An ongoing debate among gamers and culture critics of all variety has been asking whether video games are art. The Washington Post published a short piece asking Pulitzer Prize winning book critic Michael Dirda if the critical-acclaimed game BioShock can be considered art.
After playing the game, with some difficulty, Dirda recognized BioShock “obviously [had] artistic value” but “would hesitate to go that far” as to call it art.
Various articles and “art” critics have been chiming into the debate. Roger Ebert recently backtracked on his 2005 statement that video games are “inherently inferior to film and literature,” now saying video games can be art, but not high art. In Ebert’s 2007 column, he wrote: “Anything can be art. Even a can of Campbell’s soup. What I should have said is that games could not be high art, as I understand it.”
The problem I find in these arguments is there is little defining of what art is. This is the challenge because defining art becomes the kind of thing you can’t describe but you know when you see it.
Ebert, for instance, says video games are limited as a art form because of player choice whereas movies and literature force your path (he’s never played Final Fantasy has he). Dirda claimed art needed to make you sad, which video games don’t. But this only says why something might not be art. It doesn’t describe what is art.
Frankly, I subscribe to Scott McCloud’s broad but meaningful definition of art in Understanding Comics as anything done not for survival. This means even solving a math problem can be considered math. I say this because I don’t think there is a difference between art and high art. I prefer to call things good art and bad art. This is very subjective but does not ban any medium as a whole from being consider art. Each unique piece is evaluated on its own merits. To a mathematician, a simple equation to solve a complex problem might be beautiful art whereas a cubism painting might have no meaning and be deemed bad art. The math problem and painting are not being compared to each other. Instead, they are being evaluated for their own qualities.
This is why Ebert and Dirda’s definitions make little sense. Ebert says personal choice makes video games more like sports than art. But what about martial arts? Sometimes martial arts can be brutal sports or artfully crafted dances. What about improvisation in acting or jazz music? Personal choice already has a part in popular art forms. Video games pushes that limit like no other medium. Dirda’s argument that art must be sad, well, everything that isn’t the English Patient suddenly becomes trivial.
Moreover, niche mediums like video games and comic books often get slighted for their artistic merit, much like the way science fiction and fantasy movies are snubbed by awards and critical acclaim. “Higher” art forms might be threatened by the encroaching competition or simply think to highly of themselves. Michael Grade, executive chairman of UK network ITV criticized video games as a “moral vacuum” for their violent content” claiming television violence was morally superior because of its storytelling format. Of course, he probably doesn’t mind when video games make games based on violent television shows.
The truth is video games are a young medium. There are many technological hurdles to overcome, much like film, that slow the development of an understood artistic language. But video games and other mediums should be compared on their own merits. I would never play a video game in place of reading a book. The two are different in the way they give me information and the way I process that information. I gain different skills and different experiences from both and both are equally valuable. One might be for learning, the other for enjoyment, but life requires both. And that doesn’t make a book or a video game a bad thing. But it just might make it art.
7. Final Fantasy VI
7. Buffy Season 8
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