Videogames are art, and if you think I’m wrong and want to argue with that, find some other place and time to do it. This is one of our postulates: Videogames are a form of art. I feel the human experience can be broken into a host of things that are art, or not-art, and videogames, by whatever goes into them, are art. The question are videogames art or can they be art, which typically invokes Roger Ebert as if he invented the question in 2012, are often followed by trying to invoke specific games as works of art.
And like, okay, if you think Bioshock Infinite was something you want to put forward as a great artistic experience, you can do that, but I’ll think you’re a dipshit. On the other hand, I won’t argue that it’s not art.
What it is, and what this conversation seems to ignore, is that there’s a lot of room in videogames for shitty art.
It’s really strange to me to see this mindset that only wants to bestow the status of art as concurrent with quality. That every person who’s ever had this conversation about videogames can’t remember going to a museum as a kid and thinking oh is that all?
The thing I find truly hard to express and explore about videogames when we start talking in terms of art is the scale of the time experience, coupled with the way that scale moves. A long movie is a long movie, but it’s long for the same people who hear it. A long piece of music is a long piece of music but broadly speaking if you want to hear that piece of music, it will take the same amount of time as usual. Altering the speed and pace of a piece of music changes it – tautologically. But with videogames, the pace of a player does not necessarily deform the story, the narrative, the art of the piece. One of the reasons for this is that the play in games is typically connective tissue, and because of its distinction from our conventional view of story, because of our feeling of control, we rarely recognise our part of it. We are the invisible agent of the game’s narrative, which is often why players have weird blindness about the way the game state changes. Finishing a level with a gun in hand as opposed to finishing a level with an axe in hand are often not perceived as differences. Finishing a level in five minutes versus finishing it in two versus finishing it in twenty aren’t seen as having an impact on the plot.
In some games, particularly tight games, these distinctions can be massive. For example, in Hotline Miami, the game uses failure states to induce frustration – players almost always remark on the tension or anger the game induces. In Skyrim, the openness of the game is proactively employed to create a sense of vast scope, and to reinforce a narrative that’s about something not happening. In most games, however, there is huge variance in how they’re experienced in time. That’s something conventional art doesn’t often have to deal with.
Know what else we’re not conventionally used to considering, however, is variance in quality.
There are games that are made by small, focused groups but those games tend to be sequestered, often defined by their means of production rather than by their content, and the majority voice of gaming is instead turned to larger experiences created by teams of people. Consider for example, Metal Gear Solid V, a game that I have not played, probably never will play, and largely am not interested in playing, but which all observational information tells me is a work of high-wire genius, The Most Triple-A Videogame Of Videogames, a deliberate ridiculousness simulator, and vile tripe barfed out by a total fuckhead.
It’s strange, then, that these things are seen as being in conflict with one another.
If I sat down and watched one hundred hours of movies, those movies could, even if they were all in the same genre, vary wildly in the things they do and the way they do them, the quality and the values on display, reflect creators or actors or even the audience purchasing them, and in the doing I would be able to have moments of great art and poor art and that’s okay. I would be able to partake in the creative work of thousands of people and some of it would suck and some of it wouldn’t and yet, throughout it all, the fact that that work wasn’t cohesive wouldn’t make any less of the parts of it art. A tv show shot with the Mona Lisa in the background being poorly framed does not make the Mona Lisa not art.
Fact is, videogames are bigger art than we’re used to, they’re slower art and slower in ways that you can re-experience, and the language we’re using to discuss games as art is inadequate, as are most of the people. Because as long as we’re assuming art is a sign of quality, rather than a sign of expression we’re pretty much just pretending that shitty art doesn’t exist.
And look, let me tell you, Bioshock Infinite sure as fuck exists.
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