Are Computer Games Art?
30 May 2008 – 6:52 am by Rich Cochrane
Columnist Charlie Brooker recently stirred up this familiar hornets’ nest by writing a piece about censorship of computer games, inspiring a slew of comments comparing the medium to films and novels. Are modern computer games a valid art form, and should Grand Theft Auto IV be treated just like a painting or a symphony?
It’s an oft-aired question on the internet, where game afficionados are perhaps a little over-represented, and a positive answer usually emerges. But the question of whether something is an art form or not is incredibly hard to frame sensibly.
From the outset I should point out that I’m not a gamer, but I certainly don’t have an axe to grind either way, as I hope will become obvious.
The most vexing question in all this is what we mean by art, or by an “art form”. Certainly this term is commonly applied as a positive value judgement: if something is particularly good, we like to call it a “work of art” even if it’s just some nicely-grouted bathroom tiles. I don’t think this is what people are getting at when the claim the status of “art form” for computer games. Certainly it’s part of it, but it’s not the whole thing, otherwise we’re just arguing about whether computer games are “good” or not, and that’s clearly daft. There’s something else about art forms over and above any judgement of value.
Wittgenstein on Family Resemblances
Unfortunately, we search in vain for a mathematical if-and-only-if definition of an art form. There just isn’t a list of criteria out there that we can check computer games against to see if they’re really an art form or not. If there were, we wouldn’t be having this argument, would we?
In these situations — which are very common — philosophers naturally think of Wittgenstein’s idea of “family resemblances” between things that fall under a particular concept. He even used games as a key example.
For Wittgenstein, we learn a concept like “art form” by looking at cases. Painting a picture on canvas is usually art, but painting the gutters of your house generally isn’t. Playing a piano is art but selling it, or disposing of it in a skip, isn’t. A novel is art, but a photocopier’s instruction manual isn’t.
By hearing these usages in real-life situations, we absorb a fuzzy picture of how we should use it for ourselves. Then we start trying it out, and we note when people approve or disapprove of the way we use it. So the idea we have firms up, although it never quite becomes concrete and it’s not likely to have exactly the same meaning for you as it does for me.
How does this help us? Well, it hopefully deflates any idea that we can dogmatically assert one position or the other. It also reminds us that the idea of an “art form” is something culturally-determined, and something that changes with time. Soup cans and urinals didn’t used to be art either; now they are, for us, but they weren’t for people in the nineteenth century, say, and that’s fine.
So who decides what counts as art and what doesn’t? Well, in a sense, it’s simple: we do. Arthur Danto proposed the idea that an “artworld” of powerful people and institutions is largely responsible, which seems plausible, but there’s no well-defined edge to it. A society determines for itself what it wants to count as its art-objects and, I think, also its art-forms.
For computer games to be an art-form, on this view, requires an artworld, a loose coterie of curators, writers, intellectuals and so on who, in a speech-act sort of way, proclaim them so. We don’t have that, at least not yet. So on Danto’s definition computer games aren’t artworks.
You don’t have to buy Danto’s idea, but the nice thing about it is that it turns the question into a fairly straightforward matter of fact. In particular, it’s not a judgement of value. Cures for diseases aren’t artworks either, but they’re valuable. In fact, an artworld definition slightly deflates any intrinsic value you might think art has in virtue of its being art, since really it’s just something we decided to treat as art for a while.
Computer Games as a Medium
Computer games are, however, products of craft, and often involve a very high degree of skill. That skill is brought to bear in giving a raw material — CPU cycles — meaningful form. As such, computer games can certainly be thought of as a communicative medium and, like all media, they can be used for many purposes.
Think of the medium of film. You can use it to make a training video for your company’s HR department, or a trashy action movie, or an art-house experimental film. In the first case, few people would consider the product to be an artwork. In the second, we might be unsure about whether it’s an artwork, but we might all agree it’s no good. In the third, we might all agree it’s an artwork but we might argue about whether it’s any good or not.
I think this is how we should think of computer games: not as an artform (or not) but as a medium that’s capable of having many applications beyond the usual shooting-driving-jumping kinds of things we usually think of. FoldIt, for instance, is a game designed to encourage humans to use their intuition to help computers solve protein-folding problems that could one day lead to medical breakthroughs.
I suspect that computer games are still in their infancy as a medium, and that in the future they’ll find many more now-unforeseen applications. One of those may be the creation of artworks, and it surprises me that more artists haven’t experimented with the form (if you know of any, put links in the comments please). But I’m sure they will, and I’m sure computer games will develop their own artworld and will become an art form (as well as having other uses). But I don’t think we’re there yet, not because the games aren’t good enough measured against some unspecified standard of quality, but because they don’t yet have an artworld to create the right kinds of meanings around them.
4 Responses to “Are Computer Games Art?”
The ‘right kind of meanings’? Presumably you need to appeal to some kind of standard here in order to decide e.g. whether or not a critic’s comments on the way Cannon Fodder’s gameplay mechanics reflect the wastage of war count as a step in the direction of bringing a gaming artworld into being. (’Cannon Fodder offered a large but not inexhaustible supply of men… More importantly, each of the characters had a name, which inevitably humanised them. Even more importantly, whenever anyone died, a gravestone was added to the hill. By the end of the game, that grassy mound was a genuine cemetery. Look what you made.’) But I think you have a tension between the need for a family resemblance (you draw comparison with cinema, as everyone does; although I’ve seen it contended that often dance or architecture would be more appropriate reference points) and the possibility of a transformational understanding of art (which is basically the appeal of the ‘artworld’ definition to begin with). There used to be a critical schism between ‘narratologists’, who thought games were basically narrative media with interactivity adding an extra dimension, and ‘ludologists’, who thought the element of interactivity represented a fundamental break from non-interactive media. Nowadays the debate is pretty well universally agreed to have ended in an honourable draw, with the question of exactly what kind of medium games are compared to others still up for grabs.
If I go about enquiring into the aesthetics of video games, then of course I can pull something impeccably aesthetic from the literature and wonder e.g. whether exploring the vast, near-empty landscape in Shadow of the Colossus reflects the Kantian dynamical sublime; I might, indeed, draw an affirmative conclusion; but in doing so I’d be trying to fit the topic into the conventions of an already existing artworld. So then the contention presumably is, well, if there are new and different things to be said about games, let an artworld come into being to talk about them—but how can you tell it hasn’t, if it’s expected to be new and different? For that matter, how can you be confident you understand what the candidates are trying to do, when you’re not a gamer, and hence your perspective is grounded in other artworlds?
One of the well known (though retrospectively identified) examples of New Games Journalism is in large part about a bicycle. (’Around this time, you might remember that you have a bicycle somewhere… The sound of the bike pedalling through the water is eerie. It’s something you’ve never heard in the game before. Not only that, it’s something you could have very well played the whole game without ever having heard.’) It doesn’t sound much like Art Criticism… but is it legitimate to think that’s a problem?
By Robert Seddon on May 30, 2008
As an addendum to my previous comment (and to make sure you know that one needs to be fished out of the pit of suspected spam; too many hyperlinks, I expect): quite a lot of gaming now is self-referential within the medium, notably ‘masocore’ amateur games which often aim to confound players’ expectations of how games in their genre ‘ought’ to play. I’d say these fall somewhere nebulously in the region of parody and genre critique, but I suspect they’d typically be overlooked as candidates for fitting critical discourse, being, well, games themselves.
By Robert Seddon on May 30, 2008
This post really needs a pointer to its antecedent, as it rehearses many of the same arguments, and to my mind again exposes the weaknesses of analytical philosophy when approaching as complex a social phenomenon of art. A urinal no more ‘is’ art than it was before Duchamp put one in a gallery as a critical attempt to show how the gallery creates rather than merely displays art.
Computer games clearly have a lot in common with film: predominantly visual forms, structured by narrative. They are subject to the same kind of broadsheet criticism as films are: those that the critic favours possess the properties of great art, those that don’t, aren’t. Definition-wise, calling them an ‘artform’ will do. A more profitable line of enquiry might be what are the unique and interesting characteristics of an artform that requires its consumer’s total involvement to work. Where’s the authorship in GTA: to what extent can it be said to exist unless it’s being played?
Thoughts about the ‘applications’ of games that aren’t the games themselves are beside the point: I doubt that you could ever be persuaded to evaluate classical music by the calming effect it has on violence-prone teenagers (though been to Brixton tube station lately?). The obvious form in the running for being more likely to be considered art than games themselves, though, is, of course machinima.
By Danny on May 30, 2008
I guess I keep coming back to this theme because I suspect that when we call something an “art object” we mean it’s good for a certain kind of use. And as John Cage tried to convince us, anything can in fact be put to that kind of use; so the question is how come when we want an aesthetic experience we, say, listen to music rather than the traffic outside the window.
And in that context I think the artworld view is the only game in town. It explains that looking for an aesthetic experience is something we can only do when we buy into a certain kind of narrative, and that that narrative also constructs the objects we can engage with to achieve our goal. And by “aesthetic experience” I think we can include just those kinds of things we expect: a critical distancing from everyday life, or a supposed insight into the nature of things, or an unusual experience that tells us something about ourselves, or a narrative that has supposedly universal human applicability, or a joy in pure form. All these ideas are constructed in narratives the artworld produces.
This is a very good point about the games artworld, if such a thing exists:
“[L]et an artworld come into being to talk about them—but how can you tell it hasn’t, if it’s expected to be new and different”
and it’s because of that that I think the family resemblances idea might be helpful. We look for similar sorts of things from the narratives around gaming before we’re ready to accept they’re giving us a new art form, and they’re the sorts of things you talk about: references to Western high culture, social or political critique, authorial intent or a critical engagement with that idea, narrative and, of course, the capacity for a form to “be about itself”. If we start seeing some of these, we get a warm feeling that the world of gaming has similarities with the worlds of painting or film or music, and we think of it as an artworld.
By Rich on May 31, 2008