The question ‘are videogames art’ is a wonderful question because it lets you see who isn’t actually very well informed about what art is or maybe what videogames are. It’s the kind of question that derives from gallery culture – ‘it’s nice, but is it art‘ – that is explicitly meant to be a parody of things that don’t really happen much. It’s a joke about pretentious dipshits which is, itself, being taken seriously when it’s moved out of the fora of conventional artworks to the perspective of videogames.
It’s okay! Most of the people writing about this didn’t study art. Most of them are just … well, videogame players, and it seems that statistically, that’s not a perspective that brought to bear on a lot of conventionally-viewed-as-art. It’s why we keep talking about the Citizen Kane of videogames, because holy crap, you’ve heard of Citizen Kane? You must be a fancy sort of person type!
Look, art is not some arbitary threshold of meaning. Art is a composition, it is a component of things. Some art objects are made up of ‘mostly art.’ Some art objects are really only there to BE art, and those artworks are what a lot of us conventionally view as art. The idea that the sketchpad scribblings of a tumblr artist can be art but somehow the vast vistas of Dark Souls can’t be because one of them is designed to serve some form of a purpose, designed to be part of something else, is weird.
It’s a bit like saying because the Mona Lisa was a comissioned artwork it doesn’t really count as art, because it was made for a purpose.
It’s a charming little question, where one of my teachers summarised the conversation – on an academic level – thus:
“Are videogames art? Yes, now fuck off.”
It’s not a meaningful question, not a meaningful conversation, if you’ve actually had any acquaintance with the breadth of design and art. It’s a dismissable idea.
And now, videogame journalists – who I am sure are all lovely people, except those who are total toolbags – are going to circulate around thinkpieces and maybe some of them will bust out some first-level google scholar citations or maybe reference that thing they’re pretty sure they read that one time.
In the mean time, developers and creators will continue making art. Some of it won’t be particularly smart or good art. Some of it will be about expressing small, silly ideas. Some of it will just be aping other, earlier forms of art, things they’re familiar with, things they’ve wanted to do for a good long time but never really got around to doing.
We must unshackle our thinking from the notion that art means good art. That art is a term of quality and not a term referring to general traits.
Art is scattered throughout most of our creations. There are always parts of human designs that have, to some extent, an element that references our desire to express an idea or a creative position. You can think of art as glitter – it’s everywhere, it gets everywhere, and sometimes even if there’s only a little bit of it on a thing, you’ll still notice it, even unconsciously. Some objects are made of a lot of art, and some are made of almost none.
The space where we make choices in creation that lays between art and design is a curious one. After all, design is usually crafted with a tangible aim – “we want this object to do this.” – but art is somehow perceived as having intangible aims – “we want this object to make people feel this.”
I’ve written about videogame art before, of course. I’ve talked about how videogames are all art, and some of them are just crappy art. Some of them are just big art, too – the notion that videogame artwork is just an accidental structure of a scale we’re simply unused to. It’s interesting too, because it’s not like literally every single second of a movie has to be of such quality that it carries the entire piece – well, I mean, there’s some Kubrickian style scholars who may disagree.
But videogame art, at its core, is the art we have put in videogames, because we can’t help it.
All videogames are art, it’s just some of them aren’t very good art. Some of them don’t express very interesting ideas. Some of them are a bit silly. Some of them only want to express ideas like ‘I love this thing’ or ‘I don’t want to think about my life’ and that’s entirely okay.
Art is a sanctuary from the demands of an unscrupulous reality, not some arbitary threshold of acceptable ways to spend your time.