ART AND AESTHETICS
Video Games and Art
The video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios, 2011) can be considered a beautiful representational artifact. The naturalism and rich detail of its environments, the evocative nature of its music, and the exploratory role of the player make playing this game a frequently aesthetically rewarding experience. Video games such as Skyrim, and also older games such as Space Invaders (Taito, 1978), raise a number of issues within the discipline of aesthetics. Most obvious is the question of whether these games are actually works of art. But in addition to this familiar question are less frequently investigated issues such as the ontology of video game art, the precise role of the player in the artistic performance and appreciation of games, and whether video games have distinctive modes of artistic expression. This essay surveys some of the recent attempts to understand these issues.
Are Video Games an Art Form?
Many gamers and game designers themselves are invested in the issue of whether video games are art, something given evidence by the heat in the many online discussions of this question. What is infrequently noted in such discussions, however, is that there is an existing academic concern with the issue, and a body of theory that significantly clarifies what is at stake in the debate. Numerous academics and theorists have considered the possibility that computer games belong among the arts. Henry Jenkins considers video games as one of the “lively arts,” a category introduced by the cultural critic Gilbert Seldes (Jenkins, 2005). Steven Poole thinks that games have the potential to be art “even if they are not there yet” (2000, p. 29). More sustained argument that video games are an art form has come from philosophers of the arts, theorists who are well-placed to resolve this issue (Smuts, 2005; Lopes, 2009; Meskin and Robson, 2010; Tavinor, 2009, 2011; Gaut, 2010).
There are three important points of clarification to be made at the outset of this discussion. First is an ambiguity in the usage of the term art in the context of video games. It is customary to refer to as “the art of a game” those formal aspects that embody the design and artistic content, and often in such a way that these aspects are contrasted with game mechanics and gameplay. There have already been a number of published collections of this art (Jenisch, 2009; Kelman, 2006). This customary usage of the term art is a complicating factor in the present context because the existence of video game art as a design aspect needs to be reconciled with the potential that video games are themselves works of art.
Second, it should be noted that it is not necessary here to show that all games are art: it could be that only a subset of video games are properly considered art. Consider film; it is relatively clear that auteur films such as Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) and Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) are art, but that films such as holiday movies need not count as art works. The same may be true for video games. However great Pac-Man (Namco, 1980) is as a video game, it is not obvious that it is also art. Indeed, distinguishing between games that are properly called art, and mere games, is a part of what a theory of game art should attempt to achieve.
Third, it is necessary to distinguish the claim that there are video games that are works of art from the claim that video games constitute an art form. Consider the fact that though Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) is an artwork, urinals themselves are not an art form in virtue of this fact. Duchamp merely repurposed the urinal to create art. There are numerous instances of artists employing the medium of video games to produce works of art in a similar way. Julian Oliver’s Quilted Thought Experiment (1998) employs the game engines of the first-person shooters Half-Life (Valve, 1998) and Quake (id Software, 1996) to allow for experimental live music performances. As in the case of Fountain, it could be that even though these uses of game media constitute works of art, the medium of video gaming itself is not an art form in virtue of this. This implies that the important test cases for the status of games as an art form are not so-called “art games” or uses by artists of the medium of gaming for artistic repurposing, but mainstream games such as Skyrim and Space Invaders.
There is evident resistance to the claim that such video games are art, a fact that is unsurprising if we consider the similar resistance that occurred when cinema was first proposed for art status (Gaut, 2010, pp. 21–50). There are at least two negative arguments against the claim that video games are art, which I will refer to here as the “masterpiece argument” and the “disqualification argument.” First, it can be claimed that video games have not yet produced a compelling case of an artistic masterpiece. As film critic Roger Ebert notes, “No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets” (Ebert, 2010). It is tempting to dismiss Ebert’s arguments because he is an outsider with a self-avowed lack of gaming knowledge, but these facts are not relevant to assessing the formal qualities of his arguments. Indeed, the masterpiece argument is credible because many of the games that are held up as cases of artistic games come off very poorly if their artistic qualities are compared with the masterpieces of established art forms. Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar San Diego, 2010) is frequently and justly held up as a high point of recent game art, but even in this game the drama and narrative is a rather derivative and often ham-fisted approximation of the Western genre; treated as a film, it is firmly B grade. It is an unexceptionable statement that the narrative, characterization, acting, and writing found in video games are often of poor quality. Moreover, it is difficult to find a single instance where these aspects reach the heights of refinement they do in the confirmed arts.
Presumably the argument here is that if a medium has not produced a work to stand alongside the masterpieces of uncontested artistic forms, then that medium is incapable of producing art. But this argument is not conclusive because it is not clear that video gaming needs to have produced a masterpiece to count as art, because there are art forms without masterpieces, for example “minor arts” such as food (Telfer, 1996) and also art forms in early stages of development. Though the presence of an artistic masterpiece in a medium may be a sufficient condition for that medium to be art, it is not a necessary condition because there may be contingent reasons for why a given art form has not yet produced a masterpiece. There is also a further worry here: the comparison of video games with the masterpieces found in other art forms may simply be unfair to video games. Do we even know what a game masterpiece looks like? Perhaps it is unfair to judge Red Dead Redemption as we would a film, because it is after all a video game with quite different artistic aims and means. More work needs to be done on the unique nature of video game art to understand its real potential as art; a theory of why some games are art is an important step in achieving this clarification.
The second argument against video games being counted as art is that they may have features not seen in the genuine arts, features that disqualify games from being art: specifically, video games have rules and are competitive, and they are interactive. Again, Ebert (2010) provides an example of this argument when he notes that “One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome,” and that genuine arts such as theatre, film, and literature, “are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.” Furthermore, “[v]ideo games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control” (Ebert, 2005). Hence, disqualifying video games from the status of art are the facts that video games involve first, competition, and second, audience choice, as neither of these things is seen in genuine art forms such as literature or cinema.
As it stands, these are little more than assertions. Furthermore, it might be pointed out that there are interactive artworks besides video games. Dominic McIver Lopes discusses a number of such cases in his theory of computer art (2009). For example, Scott Snibbe’s Boundary Functions (1998) is an interactive work that employs a camera and computer to detect the presence of interactors on a stage, projecting Voronoi tessellations that encircle them (Lopes, 2009, p. 25). And yet this response is perhaps not decisive. It is not sufficient to point out previous cases of putatively interactive art, because the opponent of video game art could also simply deny that these interactive works are properly called art. Also, even if these cases of interactive art are beyond dispute it is still difficult to find accepted cases of art that instantiate rules and competitive behavior within the work (Tavinor, 2009, p. 192).
While it is true that interaction and competition are not characteristic of most traditional art—and these qualities are more commonly associated with the categories of games and sport—it is one thing to claim that the previous art has not typically included some feature, and another thing to demonstrate that future art cannot have that feature. A further argument is needed to justify the claim that these qualities disqualify an artifact from being art.
Moving beyond these negative arguments, what positive reason is there to think that video games are or can be art? There is at least one argument that is not decisive in favor of video games being considered art. As noted at the beginning of this essay, video games clearly have art design, and there are artists involved in their construction. It might be thought that these are prima facie reasons to think that video games are artworks. However, I have argued elsewhere that not everything with evidence of art design is properly called art, with television shows, greeting cards, and magazine advertisements being examples (Tavinor, 2009, p. 173). It could be that the art design evident in games plays the superficial function of providing an aesthetically pleasing presentation of the game, without that game subsequently being a work of art.
The claim that video games are art can be backed up by invoking a definition of art (Smuts, 2005). To assess the art status of video games the natural approach would be to attempt to identify in video games the qualities that are held to be the defining qualities of art. Two difficulties here are that definitions of art are themselves contentious with a number of current candidates (Davies, 1991), and also that the art status of games might differ depending on the definition we choose to employ.
These problems can be somewhat avoided by employing a “cluster theory” (Gaut, 2000) or “disjunctive definition” of art (Dutton, 2009). Though they are importantly different, these approaches to characterizing art are similar in that they claim that there is no one essential property to art, rather art is characterized by a cluster concept or disjunctive list of qualities. Typically included as characteristic of art are aesthetic properties, the display of a high degree of skill or creativity, the application of criticism, emotional expressivity, formal complexity, imaginative experience, individual point of view or style, and the presentation of intellectually challenging or meaningful ideas. An object is a work of art if it has sufficient of these attributes; and importantly, artworks can lack individual such properties if they instantiate enough of the core to be recognizable as art.
There are many video games in which most of these features can be found. This seems most obvious in the so-called “art games” such as Jason Rohrer’s Passage (2007) and the works of Julian Oliver. But also, the trend in mainstream video games has been toward games that encompass more and more of this characteristic artistic territory. So returning to Skyrim we see obvious aesthetic properties; a representational artifact that gives evidence of being constructed with great skill, creativity and style; a work that is subject to criticism and that is emotionally expressive; and an artifact that has a high degree of formal complexity (think especially of the narrative or spatial complexity of the game). Skyrim is not especially intellectually challenging, but as noted, under a disjunctive definition the lack of one of the criteria is not decisive; furthermore, the lack of intellectual challenge is characteristic of the “mass arts,” a form of art theorized by the philosopher Noël Carroll, of which video games seem an obvious candidate (Carroll, 1998). Hence, because Skyrim is an artifact that exemplifies so many of the characteristics of art it may be unfair to deny the game the appellation.
And yet, under this approach, not all video games will count as works of art (Tavinor, 2009, p. 191). Space Invaders, even though it is one of the greatest of all video games, may not count as a work of art because it has a very partial overlap with the qualities found in the disjunctive definition of art. However, that there are video games that are not works of art does not mean that video gaming is not an art form, because similarly, there are paintings and films that are not art even though cinema and painting constitute art forms.
What Kind of Art Form Are Video Games?
If video games are a form of art, what kind of art is the art of video gaming? It is worth pausing here to consider the meaning and rationale of this question. One might think that explaining video games as a kind would attempt to pick out their necessary and sufficient conditions through an essentialist definition, showing how they are unique as art. I have doubts that anything like this can be done for artistic video games; rather, a theory of games as art should be pragmatic and should give us some guidance in explaining and appreciating the art form. The question of what kind of art video games are is best answered by situating games within the theoretical context that illuminates their distinctive modes of artistic creation, experience, and expression.
Games theorist Mark J. P. Wolf suggests that “video games can be considered as graphic art, as time-based art, as narrative art, as interactive art” (2010). It is true that games have each of these features, and that there is much to be learned by examining these aspects. And yet this collection of features is very much a list of structural and artistic traits that video games happen to display as artworks, and it is a list that might well be augmented with other artistic facets such as spatiality, representation, music, animation, and so on. I suspect that it is Wolf’s last named aspect—interactivity—that is crucial to understanding video game art, and indeed that it is the interactivity of video games that explains the distinctive modes of graphical, time-based, and narrative art found in video games.
Several philosophers of the arts have already argued that it is the inclusion of interactivity that sets video games apart from other graphical, narrative, or cinematic art forms (Lopes, 2009; Gaut, 2010; Tavinor, 2009, 2011). Lopes argues that video games are at the popular end of the spectrum of “computer art,” a form of art he thinks is partially characterized by its interactivity (2009). Berys Gaut considers video games as a form of “digital interactive cinema” (2010). I have made a similar claim in arguing that mainstream video games are a form of “interactive mass art,” drawing together the theoretical understanding of philosophers such as Lopes and Carroll with a careful analysis of video game technology and practice (Tavinor, 2011).
Within games studies and technology writing there has been some skepticism about the usefulness or coherence of the concept of interactivity (Manovich, 2001; Aarseth, 1997). In an earlier paper on the topic, Lopes, though noting that the term frequently is just a “buzz-word,” defines interactivity in an artistic context as being where the user makes decisions that impact on the artistic structure of the work as it is displayed (2001). Refining this definition, Gaut points out that because some performance arts authorize the performer to change the work in the process of interpreting the work, without the work thereby becoming interactive, that interactive works are those where the “audience” specifically has a shaping role (Gaut, 2010, p. 143). Hence an interactive art work is one in which the audience makes decisions that affect the artistic structure of the work’s display.
Video games are a clear case of such interactivity. Interactivity is certainly not unique to video games because it is shared by works of interactive computer and video art (Lopes, 2009). But because of the impact of player choice on the ontology of video games as an art form, interactivity is a central concept in understanding the distinctive modes of artistic creation, expression, performance, and interpretation that attend their art. The remainder of this essay explores how the role of interactivity in the ontology of video games affects the resulting art.
An ontological theory concerns the mode of existence of an object or kind of object, and with art, ontological theories are crucial to explaining how differing works of art are produced and appreciated, and the nature of their expressive properties (Thomasson, 2004). A number of observations can be made about the ontology of video games as art. Many artworks are comprised of a singular object, such as where Michelangelo’s David is identical with a particular lump of marble that can be found in Florence. A multiple instance artwork, however, may be instantiated in a number of spatially and temporally distinct artifacts, such as the film Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), which can be screened any number of times at different sites. Though the existence of singular video games is not a conceptual impossibility, it is clear that the vast majority of video games have a multiple instance ontology because they exist in multiple spatial and temporal instances.
Multiple instance works are typically reproduced for appreciation, though the exact means through which a work is reproduced varies between media. Multiple instance works are usefully characterized by the logical “type/token” distinction, so that the film Star Wars is a work type that can be instantiated by a number of work tokens, which are comprised of individual screenings of the work. Where a film is reproduced by a screening, a video game is reproduced through its various playings, which are dual acts of performance and interpretation (Gaut, 2010, pp. 145–146). Thus, the ontology of a video game such as Skyrim is of a work type with number of tokens in the form of different playings. It is because video game works are instantiated through this audience participation that they are fruitfully considered as interactive works.
Because multiple instance ontology is a further definitional feature of Carroll’s characterization of “mass art,” and because they typically gravitate toward accessible art, mainstream video games such as Skyrim are likely to count amongst the mass arts (Carroll, 1998, p. 196; Tavinor, 2011). But despite this ontological similarity, the interactivity of video games means that they differ to the other mass arts in the degree of variation among their tokens. In a film such as Star Wars one can expect the action to unfold in a set order and pace: Luke will discover the charred corpses of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, leave the planet of Tatooine, and eventually destroy the Death Star in his X-Wing fighter. But in different playings of Skyrim one cannot have clear expectations about the content and its order of presentation. So, for example, in the main quest of the game the player learns that the leader of the mysterious Greybeards is in fact a dragon named Paarthurnax. Because in his past life the dragon was responsible for the killing of the defenders of the line of kings, the Blades, the player is given the choice by the Blades to either kill Paarthurnax or forgo their aid. This plot event, and its outcome, is a variable occurrence within the game. Hence, the various tokens of Skyrim differ in terms of their representational content, and these differences are attributable to the decisions the player makes and to the representational variables determined by the game algorithm.
A video game token is an individual playing, but what kind of thing is a video game type? With film, the work type is composed of an abstract audio-visual structure that via templates such as film reels and digital files can be reproduced on a number of different occasions (Carroll, 1998, p. 218). But video games do not have such reproducible templates because of the variation in their instances (even if their programs are usually distributed via templates such as CDs and downloadable files). The work type of Skyrim is not a template from which a screening of this work is reproduced, but a computational structure that is capable of producing any number of displays of the work when it is interacted with. Specifically, the work type with video games is composed of a game algorithm as interpreted through a collection of artistic assets, and it is this object that produces the game token or display via the interaction of the player (Tavinor, 2011; see also Tavinor, Chapter 53, this volume).
This definition of the work type in video games acknowledges the customary distinction between game mechanics and art design referred to at the beginning of this essay, but holds that both aspects are necessary for video game ontology. Furthermore, here we have the means of relating the art design evident in video games with their status as artworks: the style, creativity, representational content, imaginative experience, and aesthetic qualities largely attributable to the artistic assets of video games, and that the extent of these features matches that seen in uncontested art forms, are the reasons why such games now fit within the cluster theory and/or the disjunctive definition of art.
The interactive ontology of video game art has an impact on the artistic interpretation of games. Returning to the dilemma involving the dragon Paarthurnax, we can recall that in this episode the game provokes the player with the choice of letting the dragon live and forgoing the aid of the Blades, or of killing the venerable dragon to further the player-character’s own goals. Paarthurnax, as the player discovers, loves to talk, and one of the frequent topics of his conversations is the mastery of one’s power. In an ethical turn, he asks the player: “What is better: to be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?” Paarthurnax has taken on peaceful ways through a battle with his own dragon nature, and through his model of action something is suggested about the player-character’s proper response, and the mastery of his or her own increasing power in the game world. The eventual meaning of this episode depends on the player’s actions when faced with this dilemma; reflecting on the dragon’s words might lead one to a different course of action than where one plays the game insensitively. In the former case it becomes a sensible prospect to interpret the eventual actions of the player-character in a richer and more satisfying way.
Other mainstream video games such as Mass Effect (Bioware, 2007), Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar North, 2008) and Red Dead Redemption have employed this player-oriented interpretation to good effect, and it is a large part of their virtue as art that they are able to connect to the player in this way. But one could not understand the meaning and virtues of such works without placing them within something like the art-theoretical framework that I have developed here to see that in interactive artworks the player’s performative role partly constitutes the work’s instances. This is just one way in which the investigation of video games as a form of interactive art is likely to be of great interest.
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