I was a heavy contributor to the infamous Roger Ebert thread on why he thought video games can never be art, Video games can never be art. I concurred with Mr. Ebert, and a few of my answers where highlighted by Mr. Ebert. I duked it out with some of the best pro-games-are-art word-ninjas and logic-dodgers, and have a few trophies on my wall to prove it.
That said, of all the arguments in the 5,000 comments left on Ebert’s post (before it was closed), few are more potent than one presented a recent article at CNN, which adds a novel and potent twist to the thesis that video games can never be art. But we’ll qualify “art”, as I did in Ebert’s comment section, as Fine Art. This important distinction escapes 99.999% of all the video-games-are-art enthusiasts:
Why most people don’t finish video games
“…Only 10% of avid gamers completed the final mission, according to Raptr, which tracks more than 23 million gaming sessions.
Let that sink in for a minute: Of every 10 people who started playing the consensus “Game of the Year,” only one of them finished it.
How is that? Shouldn’t such a high-rated game keep people engaged? Or have player attention spans reached a breaking point?
Who’s to blame: The developer or the player? Or maybe it’s our culture?
The correct answer is, in fact, all of the above…”
Houston, we have a cultural problem. Without rehashing the endless permutations of what-is-art theory and charges of “you can’t define art” followed by “I define art as…” soliloquies, we will simply dive right in to what this study means. It means we have scientific proof that video games are not Fine Art. It means video games are…games! Whoa nelly! But how?
Can you “not finish” a Monet? Certainly you write and ponder a Monet for this or that amount of time, but you can never say you didn’t “finish” it. You either saw it or you didn’t. And you comprehended to one degree or another. Now of course there is a certain kind of very delimited relativity to comprehending art, but it’s not nearly as complicated and relative as some make it out to be.
Who ever heard of a general pattern of 90% of movie-goers “not finishing”, say, Citizen Kane or The Godfather? On the other hand, how many sessions of Monopoly, Solitaire, Risk, and Chess have people abandoned? Yeah, thought so.
Perhaps the rate of abandonment for chess games played withartfully hand-carved chess sets is lower than for your run-of-the-mill plastic chess set from Target, but only because playing with beautiful set is probably more of an occasion. The chess-is-art argument falls short for the same reason.
Yes, you may have to run out of the museum to pay the parking meter and thus not finish taking in your Renoir.
Yes, you may have to pause Citizen Kane to take the dog for a walk. But you’ll be back. And you’ll finish the predefined journey that Wells has taken you on up to that point. You don’t have a general apathy about not finishing a movie. Unless, of course, it’s awful, like most of what is on Netflix streaming these days.
But unfinished video games? They are unfinished because they don’t speak to the heart and don’t compel it to continue. They don’t rouse the desire of the beloved. They don’t stoke soul-thirst. They speak of logic, of dexterity, of thrill, of adventure, and even imagination. But we can leave these kinds of things, willy-nilly, without shedding a tear or being moved or overcome with emotion or insight.
Art is in video games. Art is in the beautiful lamp on my desk. Art is in the design of my car. But Fine Art, especially the best that the cultures of the world have created, preserved, and handed down to us as our legacy, is about the human condition, the state of our souls, our place in the world, and our place in eternity. Video games are about our place on the couch where we don’t think about those kinds of things—except in the most trivial and trite kinds of ways.
I’ll leave you with a quote from a comment of mine that Ebert highlighted on his famous post:
The 20th century tyranny of mediocrity that has obliterated objective standards of beauty is slowly grinding to a halt under the weight of its own internal contradiction. There is a nascent renaissance for the recapturing of beauty in art as conceptual art runs out of steam.
And remember, don’t feed the trolls!
I reckon I’ve finished about 10% of the fine art novels I’ve started – Albert Camus amongst others being someone I’ve dozed off a few times trying out. Yet I’ve finished pretty much every trashy novel with lots of guns that I’ve read. But I wouldn’t argue that the novels that I read to turn my brain off are art, but I’d be happy to concede to fans of Camus, etc. that their books are art. Just art I struggle with!
Comparing trashy games with fine art from other genres isn’t comparing like with like – perhaps the games that could compete haven’t been made yet (I wouldn’t know, I’m not a gamer) but that’s not to say they can never exist.
JF: The “they don’t exist yet” argument is presently the last fallback position the games-are-art crowd has. There is an enthusiastic, almost fundamentalist zeal for that kind of prophesy. I don’t have any problem with “games will be fine art” prophesies per se because people can hope for whatever they want. But as long as we acknowledge they don’t exist, most of my argument is already made. Will they ever exist? We don’t have any rational to think that they will given the incomprehensible amounts of money spent so far in 40 years of gaming development. It’s theoretically possible, but based on the evidence and long well-defined history thus far, we have no rational basis to make that leap of faith from. Reason leads to faith, and the faith gap grows where reason lacks. Right now the “games will be art” reason to faith gap is insurmountable. Again, yes, it could change, but there is no reason to hold your breath right now waiting!
There could be a lot of factors involved as to why gamers don’t complete the game’s final mission. I tried playing an online rpg but stopped because I was so caught up with my work that I didn’t have the time to play.
First, I have to mention, you speak of looking through the lens of fine art, but then you go on to talk about Hollywood films and, inexplicably, board games. I thought i would help by giving you a couple of critically accepted ‘fine art’ films. And then, I thought I would dare you to finish any one of them-
- “The Clock” by Christian Marclay
( 24 hours long, it won The 2011 Venice Biennial’s Golden Lion for best artwork in the main exhibition)
- “24 Hour Psycho” by Douglas Gordon
(same length, won the Turner Prize, wide acclaim)
- “Sleep”, “Empire”, or any comparable Andy Warhol film.
(Runtime of either of these is only about 8 hours, but they are completely unwatchable. I won’t belittle you by listing Warhol’s credits.)
I won’t short you, either, as you did make some mention of fine art. This particular sentence jumped out at me the most:
“Yes, you may have to run out of the museum to pay the parking meter and thus not finish taking in your Renoir.”
I won’t argue whether or not skimming a painting is “finishing” it, as much as I wouldn’t argue with someone if they said they beat a video game, but skipped all the side quests. How you choose to consume your media is yours, and there is almost never a definitive, all-encompassing correct way to do so.
However, if you leave a showcase, exhibition, etc, in the middle, you have not ‘completed that art’. Curation is an art form. If you were to walk into a gallery or museum or art school and ask whether or not curation is, in itself, art, likely the answer would not change. Very often the same schools, programs, or campus divisions that teach painting, or any other fine art medium, also teach curation. In movie terms, it is as if you are implying that a still frame and a full length movie are the same thing.
Finally, if you look at art history in the 20th century, I find that an interesting theme arises. If you’re questioning whether or not something is art, it’s probably art. If you demand something is not art, it unquestionably is art. The fact that a popular critic insists that video games aren’t art has practically doomed this medium to the fate of fine art.
You mentioned Monet, but do you know his cultural significance? He founded an art movement called Impressionism. It was named by way of Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” by art critics. Critics used the name to mock and imply that the impressionists’ paintings couldn’t possibly be considered finished, labored works of art. They were doing something too vastly different from the historical portraits and landscapes of the old school. But, in time, it gained public favor, and the old way of thinking fell away.
And as the argument rages on, there are children who are consuming movies, television, video games, and fine arts. Without precedent, without distinction.
@ JL Ohly:
The mention of board games is for comparison against the completion rate of great films. The point is that, yes, many many people don’t finish sessions of Monopoly or Risk because it’s simply a game. You wouldn’t get 1.5 hours into Citizen Kane and not finish it, generally speaking. And you certainly wouldn’t watch 1.5 hours of it on a routine basis and never get to the end. Anecdotally speaking, lots of sessions of Monopoly are abandoned and not properly finished. This is part and parcel with all kinds of games. Sometimes you have your fill of a game whether or not it’s finished, and this does not detract in any way from the pleasure or meaning derived from playing it.
Second, board games, specifically chess, came up repeatedly on Ebert’s thread. “Chess as art”, including discussion about Yoko Ono’s famous all-white chess set (which renders it unplayable) were discussed at length from many different angles from the “art” of gameplay to the art of handcrafted chess pieces.
The films you mention, which I’m not familiar with, sound more like drawn out concepts, rather than uniquely unfolding and progression of a storyline with a specific journey through standard literary devices, like plot. Nobody could tolerate an 8 hour Citizen Kane. There is a difference between a story and a concept. I touch on this at places in the comments, but conceptual art is in a different category of art than the traditional skill-based forms of art.
“If you’re questioning whether or not something is art, it’s probably art.”
Perhaps, but we can also put said art on a sliding scale, a continuum, with “Art” on one end and “not art” on the other. If discussing something automatically qualifies it as art, if that is where the conversation has gotten to culturally, I’m fine with that. The cat is out of the bag, so we can move on past that discussion and start the next one. The next conversation is about the value of concepts on a sliding scale, complete with a full dose of relativity. That’s where it gets interesting. That is also precisely the point where the hucksters, shysters, pretenders, and talentless “artists” make their grand entry.
When the doorway to the discussion is gated by objective standards of beauty, 99% of prospective entrants are rejected. The “anything is art if I say it is” crowd is really a mob of mediocrity that can’t differentiate between the Sistene Chapel and first-year art student final projects.
Of course I understand Monet, but the Impressionists were working from a classical understanding of academic drawing and traditional painting methods. Their innovation is in direct relation to their understanding of what they were “breaking” from. They truly invented a new and quantifiable, as well as teachable, method of seeing and painting. It was a real innovation. They were not “vastly different” from tradition, they were a legitimate leap from and forking of tradition. You might also consider that their great leap of evolution also came to an end. Their own branch forked out into countless splinters, with each successive splinter further distanced from the principles the Impressionists leapt from, until we arrive today at pure “concept as art” with no relation whatsoever to traditional, quantifiable skills of any sort. To make it in modern art today, you need a radical lifestyle and an idea. This makes you marketable – end of story.
The old way of thinking, as you say, never completely fell away. Today, classical ateliers are popping up all over the place, and time-honored, quantifiable, and teachable skills are on the surge. What is falling away is the absurd relativity of “anything is art”. It’s just proving itself not to be true. There is no room for another Picasso or Duchamp. It’s been done. For now, the way forward is to shun concept and embrace our legacy of great art and beauty and “leap forward” from there, once again. There isn’t anything else to leap from, which is the reason we are 1) post-post-modern and 2) mining the past to find the future.
Games will remain games, video games will remain games, and video games will never be fine art. They may contain more art than ever, going forward, no doubt. But games they will remain.
AS masters of remediation, video games borrow and repurpose from every form of media that can be digitized. If it can be said that video games contain art, then they also contain that initial experience or response that the original piece of art contained. The experience will undoubtedly be altered when placed in its new video game form, but it is still an experience. There is still an elicited response.
The thing that is tough to balance is whether the new experience contains both a cognitive and physical reaction from the participant. Games have a tendency to disconnect us from the interpretive suture that we might get as we gaze and try to unravel the semiological workings of movies or a painting. If we are not actively participating in a mental discourse, then I think video games are not art. But do we not also take time to admire the brushstrokes and texture of a painting outside of any meaning it might hold? Do we not have to go through the mundane task of paying for a movie ticket and finding empty seats before the artistic interpretations can begin. Within any game, or any other medium for that matter, there can be moments of art and moments of living in the reality of the medium.
Even after playing a game though, the experience lives on in our minds. Hmmm…I am inclined to agree that video games definitely house art and, in their best moments, challenge us as all art does.
@ PlayItLive
I agree with you, partially, that games disconnect us from “the interpretive” suture as you put it. It’s no different than putting art on say, a coffee mug. The act of using the mug disconnects us from the Monet on screenprinted on the side. If we put the mug down and reconnect the “suture” as you put it, and reconsider the Monet, we are no longer using the mug, but it is still a mug: a mug with art on it. Now there might be a cross vector between my coffee and reproduction of a Braque cubist piece of a table in a cafe, but that doesn’t make my mug into a piece of art.
If we consider the brush strokes of a painting outside of the painting itself, we are admiring craftsmanship, an “art” in itself that can be quantified in any number of painting traditions. That would be the equivalent of admiring the stitches of the cotton canvas the painting is bonded too.
Playing a good game of chess on a beautifully hand-crafted chess set may be memorable: indeed it could be striking and visceral. That does not make the experience art. The experience is still a game. The game itself may consist of components borrowed from all manner of art traditions past and present, but at no point does the amalgamation of any of these things transform a game into Fine Art. Games contain art, but are not Fine Art. Games may even contain Fine Art, but nevertheless remain games. Not that games can’t challenge us in their best moments: they do. But that experience is not one of Fine Art, it is the art of gaming that reveals interesting things about us and our world.