Opinion: Girls Fart - Gaming At The Anatomical Level
[In his new opinion piece, following his ruminations on resumes and his advice on 'being a Wiener', Reset Generation/Pocket Kingdom co-creator Scott Foe explains why saying 'games aren't art' is like saying 'girls don't fart.']
Looking back, I was either single-minded or just plain unthinking, but, by the age of twenty-one, I had accomplished the one goal to which I had ever set myself: That first year of legal drinking encapsulated my first day of gainful employment in the games industry. (To be fair, legal drinking doesn't mean very much to someone who has lived in Japan.)
That first day at Sega was even better than the Christmas when Santa forgot that I had handcuffed my baby brother to the towel rack in the bathroom.
I had, count'em, not-one-but-two Dreamcast development kits on my desk - my desk, in my cube, at Sega, where I was going to be making videogames, for profit, and would soon be on a first-name basis with Sonic the Hedgehog. ("Yo! Sonic! What's up hawg?")
And, even better, my co-workers were going to leave me alone for a whole week - leave for some event in Los Angeles called "E3."
Crazy people! Who would want to leave one's very own cube, leave one's very own Dreamcast development kits for sweaty, smoggy Los Angeles? (Little did I know that only there, at E3, could one actually pose for pictures with a real, living, breathing female!)
I was to myself in candy land, the most curious candy being the stack of "Fishing Controllers" sitting right outside of my cubicle wall. It was time to get to work...
A bobble-headed figure spun slowly on the display. When you took the fishing controller in your hand and gave a flick of your wrist, the figure's head bounced dreamily as it squealed - the figure and I had oddly similar voices. It was "Creamcast: The Sadomasochism Simulator," and it was more than the yield from my hurried study of 3D Studio MAX, affine transformations, and audio buffering sample code. It was more than my one-and-only stint as a voice-actor.
Creamcast was the product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses and emotions. It was the use of (frighteningly limited) skills to produce an aesthetic result. Creamcast was the application of (somewhat off-center) imagination in the creation of an experience that could be shared with others.
In a word, it was a work of art.
Status Anxiety
Alain de Botton is, in this writer's opinion, not only the greatest philosopher of the information age, but also the only philosopher of the information age who is deserving of being remembered by posterity as having a gravity the likes of Plato. de Botton puts forth in his to-now masterpiece, Status Anxiety, that human anxiety born of one's societal status is almost wholly a by-product of the Industrial Revolution.
Put simply, when we were serfs and royalty, the serfs might have been envious of the royalty, but most all serfs lived the same meager lives, eating the same meager bread - serfs were together in their misery.
Fast forward to today, and we need not look very far to find next-door neighbors living wildly different (disparate) levels of opulence. How can my next-door neighbor afford to drive a Beamer? Wow: My co-worker has a completely flash watch. (I'll bet she makes more than I do.)
These uncomfortable (and often, distracting) feelings weren't feelings at all in the days when a great night out meant burning a witch on top of a pile of hay and a bad night's sleep meant having used all of the hay from our beds to burn a witch. The Industrial Revolution was a revolution in stress.
The Industrial Revolution might not have created industries, but it sure did revolutionize them, or at least, that's probably when we started anthropomorphizing them. I hear all the time that the games industry is the "red-headed stepchild" of Hollywood. (Which, of course, makes the mobile games industry the dog under the porch.)
A few years back, the games industry became more upset than a tropical penguin when luminary film critic Roger Ebert conceded that, while games are art, we as an industry will never produce a work of, "high art."
Two words for you: Industry Anxiety.
An Equilateral Triangle
Games cannot be "high art," so said Ebert, because the attributes of games have "more in common with sports." Well, Ebert was slightly right (or should I say, slightly "Wright"), only in that games are also "sports."
Will Wright, the creative masthead of the games industry today, years ago identified and communicated the anatomy of games, an observation that has since shown up more often than a main character with a crew cut, but an observation worth repeating, none the less.
(Side note: They say we have so many crew cut heroes because "hair is hard to render," but that's Pikachu pucky: We thinning, aging game designers want to project the idea that we're still hard.)
Games are Story: A chronology of events. That happened, then that happened, then that happened.
Games are Hobby: Experimentation and outcome. If I do this, then this happens; if I do that, then that happens.
Games are Sport: Win, lose, or tie. I did that, and I failed; I did that, and I succeeded.
Hobby
/\ / \ / \
Story--Sport
Note: Should be an equilateral triangle, but my ascii-art sucks.)
That's gaming at the anatomical level: Any game falls somewhere on the Hobby/Story/Sport Graph. At the molecular level, games are a tapestry of visual artistry, audio artistry, narrative artistry, thespianism, as well as design and technological ingenuity, the final composition of which (or pieces in part) can rival any other experience known (or unknown) to man. (Even divorce court!)
I, for one, grow so weary of the pretense of question that games are or can someday be "high art." Saying, "Games aren't art," is like saying, "Girls don't fart."
It's pointless to argue with that sentiment. Both movies and games are the product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses and emotions. In a movie, anything can happen; in a game, everything can happen.
[About the Author: Scott Foe was creator/producer of Nokia’s critically acclaimed cross-platform game Reset Generation, and has worked on titles including Sega’s Pocket Kingdom: Own the World, the first global, massively multiplayer mobile game. Foe began his decade-long industry career as a member of the Dreamcast product development team at Sega. A game made him cry, once: He found one of the missions in Jak II so difficult that he threw his controller and burst into tears.]
Comments
(I wrote this on Gamasutra but I was hoping that since GameSetWatch is reposting it we have another chance of getting a discussion going)
I think the problem here is that the way you are using the word "art" is not the same as the way Ebert is using the word "art". The word you're using here seems to be very much a synonym of the ancient Greek word "techne", out of which eventually arose the word "technique". You are saying games are art because games are amalgamations of the "art" of animation, the "art" of programming, the "art" of design, so on and so forth. If all of the things that make up the game are called art, then surely the final product is itself art. This is definitely true of our industrial art friend (step-father???) movies, but I believe that is because movies have proven that their end product can not be "art", but "high art" as well. I think defining art as the technique of any individual artisan removes us from the definition of art as a creation whose purpose is an expression of one or more aspects of human experience.
Ebert has conceded that games are "art" because Andy Warhol's Campbells Chicken Noodle soup label is "art". What he says games are not (he says cannot be, which I disagree with, but that's besides the point) is "high art". He never really gave a great definition of what high art is, but Jason Rohrer was able to parse out a number of the elements that makes up Ebert's notion of "high art". Ebert thinks that "high art makes ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic. Additionally, high art might cause us to become more complex, thoughtful, insightful, witty, empathetic, intelligent, philosophical (and so on)". I think this has it right, as all the greatest expressive creations of the arts accomplish a number of these, in addition to being "artful" in the mastery of their respective techniques.
This belief is echoed by at least one game designer's definition of art, Rod Humble, who also put art into context with entertainment. Rod said "Entertainment is giving enjoyment to the maximum number of people you can. Art is that which can make at least one person a better human being. Long may they both prosper." I think very few games fall under even Rod's definition of art, and even fewer (if any at all) fall under Ebert's definition. As Rod said, I don't think there's anything wrong with entertainment, but I don't think our industry as it stands is very capable of producing "high art" in the sense Ebert defines it.
I realize I sound very anti "games as art", but my problem is not with games on a fundamental level, as Ebert's is. My problem is with games as they stand today and how they're made and understood. I think we don't produce games that are truly "art" very often because very few people have an understanding of the basic nature of games and how to exploit their natural proficiency to resemble and imitate human experience and then mold that representation into powerful expression. I actually think games are more than capable of being "art", their ability to directly and interactively simulate aspects of our reality makes them incredibly powerful modes of expression, we just have no idea what we're doing when it comes to making games that accomplish this. Even more than that our design conventions and traditions, some have called it games' and games designer's tendencies of cultural inbreeding, prevent us from accomplishing this.
So I agree that the "art" (techne) of games have come a long way but I don't think we as creators have come nearly as far.
Posted by: David Ravel | June 24, 2009 4:47 PM
@David Ravel: So how do we decide when a work of art is qualified to be called "high art"? Do we do a poll to see how many people were made into "better people" by it? Do we ask the creator, or more importantly, do we accept what the creator says about whether it's art or not? Do we (I'm sure Ebert would like this) defer to critics to tell us plebes what we should appreciate?
Put another way, I (and I'm sure many other people) am not inspired or moved to be a "better person" (whatever that means) by the Mona Lisa, Citizen Kane, A Tale of Two Cities, or Bioshock. I am inspired by de Chirico, Suicide Club, Rendezvous with Rama, and Nights into Dreams. My point is that Ebert's definition of "high art" (a self-serving term if there ever was one), rather than tightening the window of acceptance as seems to be his intent, instead blows it so wide open as to make the term meaningless.
I have never heard anyone give a meaningful, categorical distinction between good art/bad art or high art/low art. What we're left with is a lot of "I know what it is when I see it," which tells us a lot about the person saying it and next to nothing about the work itself. Not that I'm complaining - I don't think there is a distinction beyond taste, imposed or otherwise.
Posted by: concrete_d | June 24, 2009 9:31 PM
I'm shocked that this utterly stupid debate has survived for so long and been given so much credence.
Yes. Stupid.
'Art?' Why SHOULD games be art? If you want your game to be art, write it to cater to people you consider to be 'artistic.' If you consider only certain people to be artistic, write your game in a similarly short-sighted way.
Games are games. Portraits are portraits, novels are novels, photos are photos and movies are movies. History will always judge as it sees fit; subjecting games to the arbitrary ideas of contemporary 'art' simply adds stress to an already-difficult style of expression that should be broadening its horizons, not narrowing its scope to suit some stuffy critic.
Write games... write art... write what you want. Don't make one into the other unless that's your goal in the first place.
Posted by: phu | June 26, 2009 1:12 AM