How to Do Things with Videogames

1. Art

1 Art Are videogames art? It’s a question that’s sparked considerable debate, most notably thanks to the film critic Roger Ebert’s declaration that “the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art.”1 For the philosopher and game designer Jim Preston, it’s an absurd and useless question: To think that there is a single, generally agreed upon concept of art is to get it precisely backwards. Americans’ attitude towards art is profoundly divided, disjointed and confused; and my message to gamers is to simply ignore the “is-it-art?” debate altogether.2 Preston sheds light on a fatal problem with the “games as art” conversation. Forget games, art doesn’t have any sort of stable meaning in contemporary culture anyway. There are many reasons for such a development, perhaps the most important being that the twentieth-century avant-garde changed art for good. In the turbulent times of the first two decades of the last century, localized movements in Europe gained attention by rejecting traditionalism. Futurism’s founder Filippo Marinetti spurned all things old and embraced youth, machine, violence. Then when violence became reality in World War I, a handful of artists in Zurich concluded that if progress since the Enlightenment had led to the destruction of the Great War, then suchprogress had to berejected. Theycalled theirwork Dada. The futurists called fora total reinvention of cultural and political life. Art Dada scorned artistic and social conventions in favor of absurdism and recontextualization. Tristan Tzara performed live poetry by choosing words randomly out of a hat. Marcel Duchamp made a urinal into art by putting it in a gallery rather than a bathroom. Movements like these, which collectively became known as the avant-garde, disrupted traditional notions of art’s role and context. As the last century wore on, it became much harder to distinguish art by its form or function alone; context became the predominant factor, its arbitrariness exposed forever by Duchamp’s urinal. But even before the avant-garde, the history of art is strewn with the babesand corpsesof movementsthat hoped toreimagine or reinvent their predecessors, even if they did so less rapidly. The Gothic style of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries preferred elongation, ornament, and angles in sculpture, architecture, and painting. The Renaissance perfected perspective. Realism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focused on portrayals of everyday life, itself spawning numerous movements of their own right such as postimpressionism and the Pre-Raphaelites. From the long perspectiveof history, thevery ideathat “art” means something monolithic and certain is absurd, as Preston suspects. What lessons can videogames learn, even from a rudimentary understanding of art history? For starters, there are no unified field theories of art. The pursuit of a pure, single account of art in any medium is a lost cause. Instead, the history of art has been one of disruption and reinvention, one of conflicting trends and ideas within each historical period, and since the nineteenth century even more so. After all, the twentieth century saw the following things enjoy celebration as fine art: a urinal placed on a stand; a painting of a colored square; poetry made of words drawn randomly from a hat; an audience that cuts the clothes off an artist; industrial paint thrown onto canvas; reproductions of commercial advertisements ; a telegram sent toarecipient itclaims toportray; a barricade of oil barrels on a Paris street; a continuous live television Art image of a Buddha statue. Lest one conclude that such examples are outlandish edge cases, consider the artists who produced them: Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Tzara, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Nam Jun Paik, respectively. All are celebrated as major figures, whose status as artists would never be questioned. They demonstrate that “art” is hardly a fixed and uncontroversial topic. Art has done many things in human history, but in the last centuryespecially, it has primarily tried to botherand provoke us. To force us to see things differently. Art changes. Its very purpose, we might say, is to change, and to change us along with it. How then can we understand the role of games in art? Satisfying Ebert’s challenge that games simply need to get up off their proverbial couches and rise up to the authorial status of literature or film is not theway forward.3 Neither is the impassioned follyof appeals...