I don’t know that I could be bothered at this point to argue with someone who asserted that video game design was not art. Certainly it isn’t a closed question, not with ordinarily enlightened individuals like Roger Ebert having weighed in for the negative relatively recently. I’ve chosen my camp, I guess, and the trajectory of the conversation seems too familiar (recalling similar over non-representational painting, photography, comic books, the movies) to bother getting into it with anyone over what seems a foregone conclusion. Of course it’s art. Not all of it good art, perhaps, not much of it even, but then what ever is?
Art history, art theory, art philosophy of video games, on the other hand, is still very thin on the ground. Technical theory, certainly, the industrial arts and design practices of the art form have a firm if still nascent ground. Analysis of games as art is barely born. Video games are getting novelty exhibitions in museums now, the whole 50 year history afforded a room or two (or more likely a corner in one).
I don’t think it’s just about the usual “art form” resistance of the status quo, although that’s definitely there, as well as the “for kids” onus that still dogs comic books - with the “game” moniker probably as much of an albatross as “comics”. And as unlikely to yield convincingly to whatever civilizing nomenclature is attempted (presumably “interactive” whatever). Graphic novels, speculative fiction, we can say it with a straight face but there’s an involuntary eye-roll somewhere inside. They are and will always be comic books, science fiction... video games.
On the same token, though, we’re used to these sorts of obstacles. It seems to me that video games present some unique challenges to the development of a body of analysis of their form and function as art. It’s about the core mechanic of consumption, I think, and how completely unique it is. The core consumption mechanic of almost all the graphic arts is seeing, the core consumption mechanic of music is hearing. The core consumption mechanic of games is playing, and there isn’t really any analog in art. It isn’t just that it’s interactive, all art is interactive and some of it very much so (I’m thinking of some of the output of the short-lived Fluxus movement).
It is that play is a unique activity. It is not seeing, hearing. Its contexts, its media, have composition, formal attributes, but they are drastically different from those of visual or audio media. In video games these attributes may be obscured by how thoroughly games rely on visual and sound elements, yet it’s trivial to imagine the outlines of a video game, for instance, with no sound or visual component, and it could indeed be an experience with powerful impact - however likely such a thing would be to appear anywhere outside, perhaps, a gallery someday.
Play has been studied, particularly in development and psychology, but I think the art form of creating contexts for play has been largely neglected, despite this art form being likely as old as anything that gets routinely studied as art - certainly it is on the same time frame as recorded history, at least. I don’t know that the massive surge of video games into the forefront of popular art consumption is responsible for this deficit so much as it has highlighted it. Photography and cinema genuinely didn’t really exist prior to the 19th century, but games have been with us forever. I hope more intentional analysis of their history, theory and philosophy, as a unique branch of art, is on the horizon.
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