Opinion: Brian Moriarty's Apology For Roger Ebert
March 15, 2011 12:00 PM | Eric Caoili
[In a presentation originally given at GDC 2011 titled "An Apology for Roger Ebert," Infocom and LucasArts veteran Brian Moriarty (Loom) came to the defense of film critic Roger Ebert and his views about video games as art. Here, his lecture is reprinted in full with his permission.]
The title of this lecture, "An Apology for Roger Ebert," may require a bit of clarification.
I'm not here to offer an apology in the sense of regret for anything done wrong.
This is an apology in the sense of a Greek apologia, the systematic defense of a position or opinion.
It's a defense of Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize winning film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times who, a little over five years ago, annoyed our industry by declaring that "video games can never be art."
For those few of you unacquainted with this controversy, I'll spend just a few minutes recounting what happened.
It all started with a bad movie.
On October 21st, 2005, Universal released its adaptation of the first-person shooter game Doom.
I didn't see Doom, but Roger Ebert did. He awarded the film one star.
In his review, he wrote, "Toward the end of the movie, there is a lengthy point-of-view shot looking forward over the barrel of a large weapon ... Monsters jump out from behind things and are blasted to death, in a sequence that abandons all attempts at character and dialogue and uncannily resembles a video game."
A few days later, a reader from Missouri responded on Ebert's blog.
He wrote that "Doom ... the movie is Doom the game brought to the screen without messing around too much with the original. Doom works as a tribute because it fails so utterly as a movie."
Ebert's reply was terse. "There are ... sites on the Web devoted to video games, and they review movies on their terms. I review them on mine."
Unfortunately, Ebert couldn't resist adding one more zinger: "As long as there is a great movie unseen or a great book unread, I will continue to be unable to find the time to play video games."
The response from gamers was prompt. Hundreds of indignant blog comments poured in from everywhere.
At first, Ebert seemed willing to discuss his opinion. When a reader from Denver asked, "Are you implying that books and film are better mediums, or just better uses of your time?" Ebert responded, "I believe books and films are better mediums, and better uses of my time. But how can I say that when I admit I am unfamiliar with video games? Because I have recently seen classic films by Fassbinder, Ozu, Herzog, Scorsese and Kurosawa, and have recently read novels by Dickens, Cormac McCarthy, Bellow, Nabokov and Hugo, and if there were video games in the same league, someone somewhere who was familiar with the best work in all three mediums would have made a convincing argument in their defense."
The comments increased in volume and temperature.
On November 27, a reader wrote, "I was saddened to read that you consider video games an inherently inferior medium ... Was not film itself once a new field of art? Did it not also take decades for its ... respectability to be recognized?"
Ebert responded, "Yours is the most civil of countless messages I have received after writing that I did indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control."
He continued, "I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic."
After this, aside from an occasional snark, Ebert appeared to have written everything he cared to on the subject.
To many of you, this issue probably seems like a thoroughly dead horse.
I thought it was dead, too. Not because anything was ever actually decided, but because after nearly five years of table-pounding, everyone seemed tired of arguing about it.
But a few weeks after GDC ended last March, the flamewar erupted again.
The fuse was a TEDx lecture by Kellee Santiago, co-founder and president of thatgamecompany. Her lecture was titled "Stop the Debate: Video Games are Art, So What's Next?"
She cited three games, Waco Resurrection, Braid and her own company's Flower, as examples of games that she believes already qualify as art.
A video of her lecture appeared on YouTube. Some troublemaker recommended it to Roger Ebert.
On April 16th, Ebert posted a critique of Santiago's lecture under the blunt headline, "Video games can never be art."
He dismissed Waco Resurrection, Braid and Flower as "pathetic," and sternly predicted that "no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form."
Thousands of comments followed, nearly all of them in fierce protest.
Finally, on the first of July, just before the call for submissions to this conference was announced, Ebert posted what again seemed to be his final word.
Under the title "Okay, kids, play on my lawn," Ebert wrote, "I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so."
He went on to admit that his arguments might be more convincing if he actually bothered to play some games.
He also seemed to backpedal a bit. "What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games ... It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art."
His weary conclusion? "I have books and movies to see. I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place."
Having heard all this, you may be wondering, what is there left to defend?
Ebert caved. He admitted games could be art, eventually, didn't he? Given enough time, anything not impossible is inevitable, right?
Maybe. But that's not the part of Ebert's argument I'm here to defend.
I'm here because of this sentence: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers."
Kellee Santiago conceded this point in the first sixty seconds of her TEDx lecture.
And, as Ebert never tired of pointing out, not one of the thousands of comments he received seriously attempted any such comparison.
Now, although I'm not as experienced as Roger Ebert (experienced being a polite euphemism for elderly), I'm no spring chicken, either.
My formal education was in English. I've read many of the great books in our language, and other languages in translation. I've also watched a number of great movies, seen a number of great paintings and sculptures, and heard a lot of fine music, though never as much as I would like.
I've also been in the video game industry for nearly thirty years. Unlike Mr. Ebert, I have played many of the games widely regarded as great and seminal. I have the privilege of knowing many of the authors personally.
But as much as I admire games like M.U.L.E., Balance of Power, Sim City and Civilization, it would never even occur to me to compare them to the treasures of world literature, painting or music.
And I'm pretty sure the authors of these particular games wouldn't presume to, either.
Why are some people in this industry so anxious to wrap themselves in the mantle of great art?
It occurred to me that an art museum might be a good place to think about this.
As it happens, there's a really good art museum just a few blocks east of Worcester Polytech, where I teach game design.
So, late one morning, I found myself in the galleries of WAM, the Worcester Art Museum, wandering among the Monets and Manets, Mattisses and Magrittes.
One canvas in particular caught my eye.

It was painted around 1730 by James Northcote, a member of the British Royal Academy of Arts.
Northcote was amazingly prolific. Over 2,000 works are attributed to him.
He painted historic and current news events, scenes from the Bible and classic literature, together with hundreds of portraits.
It was his animal paintings that attracted the most attention, though. Northcote made a fortune with his dramatic depictions of jungle cats, elephants, dogs and birds.
A rival artist, Henry Fuseli, is said to have remarked, "Northcote, you are an angel at an ass, but an ass at an angel."
This Northcote in the collection of the Worcester Art Museum is not, for the most part, about animals.
The Chess Players shows a pair of gentlemen pondering over an endgame. There's a boy standing behind one of the players, and a little dog sitting in the corner.
If you study the painting for a while, you'll notice a couple of interesting details.
For one thing, the chess players clearly are not the center of attention. They're dressed in dark, sober colors, receding into the space of the painting.
By contrast, the boy appears in blazing gold. It almost looks as if he's under a spotlight.
Yet he shows no interest in the chess game. His attention is directed away from the world of the painting. In fact, he appears to be staring directly at you, the viewer.
In his left hand is a sheet of paper, covered with undecipherable characters.
His right finger appears to be pointing at something. But what? The sheet of paper? The man beside him?
And what is that dog doing there?
We'll probably never know. Everyone connected with the creation of this painting has been dead for generations.
I spent a long time sitting on the bench in front of Northcote's Chess Players.
The elements of this painting came to symbolize for me the predicament I faced by choosing to defend Roger Ebert at the biggest game conference in the world.
The two chess players are the like the game industry, self-absorbed, satisfied, confident that they will soon earn a place among the fine arts, if they haven't already.
And the golden boy is Art itself, silently watching us, pointing at a secret he longs to share.
In preparing this lecture, I plowed through a 700-page anthology on Western art philosophy, including the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Ficino, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Shaftesbury, Croce, Nietzsche, Dewey and Heidegger.
I also read a deadly-boring book on 20th century art definitions, including the writings of Weitz, Dickie and Danto.
Nowhere in 25 centuries of philosophy did I find a single author who regarded games or sports as a form of art.
When they're mentioned at all, they're dismissed as a pastime. Harmless at best, an evil destroyer of youth at worst.
Now, it's true that a number of art museums include antique toys and games in their exhibits. Some of them, soon including the Smithsonian, even display antique video games!
It's also true that games, usually dice or cards, have often been the subject or theme of great art. I found a web site with over 220 paintings of people playing Chess, and it doesn't even include this work by Northcote.
It's also true that certain 20th century art movements, including Dada, Fluxus and New Games, incorporated rules and play into some of their works. These are remembered chiefly by art historians and academics, except for Fluxus, which is famous because one of its members married a Beatle.
And you'll occasionally come across a philosopher or artist who admires the playful aspect of games, or the elegance of a Chess problem.
Some people admire the elegance of math equations, too, but nobody confuses mathematics with great art. They're different categories of human activity.
And that's how philosophy has traditionally regarded Art and Games: Categorically different.
Suggesting that a game could be great art is radical.
On the other hand, the idea of "great art" is itself somewhat radical. It dates back only about 500 years.
Before that, art was essentially practical. You valued the thing an artwork represented, not the artwork itself.
Since that time, the definition of art has undergone a continuous evolution as new ideas and technologies appeared.
This process has never been never rapid or easy. It took many decades for photography and cinema to earn their places among the Hegelian fine arts of painting, sculpture, poetry and drama, music, dance and architecture.
Now, it's natural and tempting for us to expect that games will follow the same pattern.
But there's a big difference. Photography and cinema were new technologies.
Games are not new. They've been part of our culture for thousands of years. They're much older than the belles arts of the Renaissance, older than the representational art of the Greeks, older than the cave art of prehistory.
By what right do games suddenly demand the status of great art?
If Chess and Go, arguably the two greatest games in history, have never been regarded as works of art, why should Missile Command?
Are digital games somehow privileged, somehow more artistic than analog games?
Or does the fact that video games are now almost as big as dog food somehow entitle them to a free museum pass?
Before we can proceed any further, we need to pause and address the basic semantic problem. (You knew this was coming.)
All of us, even Roger Ebert, can say what a video game is. Can any of you say what great art is?
Trying to define "art" is like trying to define "experience."
We all have an internal sense of what it signifies. But articulating it is really difficult.
And the intellectual fad of relativism makes it practically impossible.
Here's a classic demonstration:
Suppose I'm walking along a beach and come across a stick of driftwood.
I stop in my tracks. I don't touch the driftwood. I don't say anything or point out the stick to anybody. Right there, at that moment, is that driftwood a work of art?
I pick up the driftwood and, without changing it, bring it home and put it on my mantelpiece. Is the driftwood art yet?
I sign and date the driftwood and send it to an art gallery. They put it on a pedestal under a spotlight. Are we having art yet?
A art collector buys the driftwood at auction for over a million bucks. What did that collector buy?
Let's play the art game again.
This time, I walk into a plumbing supply shop and pick out a standard white porcelain urinal. I sign and date the urinal, and ship it to an art gallery. Is that urinal art?

I am being completely serious when I inform you that Marcel Duchamp's Fountain is considered by many critics to be the single most influential artwork of the 20th century.
It would probably also be the most valuable artwork of the 20th century, if it had not been accidently thrown away with the gallery trash.
Luckily, all was not lost. No less than eleven authentic replicas, individually certified by the artist, await your contemplation at various art museums.
One of these was auctioned in 1999 for $1.7 million.
A number of so-called performance artists have been arrested for trying to pee in these replicas. Most of them are now protected in transparent plastic cases. (The replicas, not the performance artists.)
Duchamp and his so-called "readymades" broke the Renaissance idea of art wide open.
He and generations of so-called "conceptual artists" changed the focus of modern art appreciation.
Instead of aesthetic value, the emphasis shifted to novelty value.
By the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan was being only a little cynical when he wrote, "Art is anything you can get away with."
It seems totally fair to ask: If a piss pot can be great art, why can't a video game?
Another argument for games-as-art goes like this: Video games incorporate, and even generate, still and moving pictures, which everyone agrees can be great art.
They incorporate and generate writing, music, sculptured objects and architecture, which can also be great art.
Suppose I design a platformer with backgrounds by Michelangelo, black and white characters from Ingmar Bergman movies, pop-up quotations from Shakespeare and music from The Well-Tempered Clavier.

I call it All Your Art Is Belong to Us!
The presentation of that game is filled with great art. Games can obviously be a context for presenting great art. Roger Ebert admits this!
But is this enough? Does an artistic presentation make a game art?
Of course it doesn't. None of you would presume to call that game "art" unless you had a chance to play it first, or at least watch somebody else playing it.
The identity of a game emerges from its mechanics and affordances, not the presentation that exposes them.
But can an arrangement of mechanics and affordances, rules and goals, itself constitute a work of art?
Before you scream "Yes," explain to me why Chess is not regarded as a work of art.
Before you scream "But it is anyway," ask yourself: Are we so ready to dismiss the wisdom of the ages to flatter ourselves?
Does it even make sense to speak of mechanics and affordances apart from presentation? Isn't it all one piece?
Or is it all just mathematics with a sprinkle of positive psychology? The gamificationists certainly seem to think so.
It's hard for anybody, even so-called experts, to agree on what constitutes great art.
Back in 1900, the trustees of the Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned a beautiful new auditorium.
Around the edge of the gold proscenium they mounted a series of nine flat plaques, three on the left, three on the right and three overhead.
The plan was to inscribe these plaques with the names of the world's nine greatest composers.
We can imagine the names that were being thrown around. Bach, Handel and Haydn, Mozart, Brahms.
But when it came time to actually sit down and determine which composers would be honored, the trustees couldn't make up their minds.
And so, for the past 111 years, visitors to Boston Symphony Hall sit before a gold proscenium with eight empty plaques. Only one, at the very top, contains a name, the only one the trustees could all agree on: Beethoven.
"Everyone has their own taste," right? "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
This commonplace was noted by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who strongly criticized it.
Kant's argument went like this: If you declare that something gives you pleasure, nobody can argue with you.
Subjective pleasure is absolutely in the eye of the beholder (assuming that the eye is the organ involved).
But if you announce that something is beautiful, you have made a public value judgment. You've identified that thing as source of pleasure that can be enjoyed by anyone.
In making such a declaration, you exercise the faculty known as taste.
It makes no sense to say that "everyone has their own taste." This is tantamount to claiming there's no common pleasure at all, only personal pleasure.
But experience tells us this isn't true. People agree that objects are pleasant or unpleasant all the time!
Psychologists even have a fancy technical term for this kind of agreement, when a feeling is experienced by more than one person. They call it intersubjectivity.
Certain people make it their business to exercise taste. These people are called (pinkies up) connoisseurs.
If a connoisseur's disinterested exercise of taste earns the agreement of many over time, he or she is called an expert.
Such an expert is Roger Ebert.
Here is a point I hope we can all agree on. Roger Ebert knows movies.
He's been writing about them since the 1960s. He's reviewed hundreds and hundreds of films, in print, on the Web and on television, and published over a dozen books.
It's no exaggeration to call him one of the world's best-known and most widely-read film critics.
His opinion about the relationship between video games and art may plausibly be dismissed as uninformed.
He admits this! He admits that he doesn't play video games, and doesn't even want to play them!
Nevertheless, most of us would hesitate to dismiss his opinion on the relationship between movies and art.
So, what does the tasteful, expert connoisseur Roger Ebert have to say about the relationship between the cinema and art? Just this: "Hardly any movies are art."
Okay, maybe Roger was having a bad day. Let's move right along another of the world's great film critics.
Here's what the late Pauline Kael wrote about the relationship between movies and art. Listen carefully.
"There is so much talk now about the art of the film that we may be in danger of forgetting that most of the movies we enjoy are not works of art ... Movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them."
So, here we have two of the world's most highly-regarded film critics, sadly assuring us that most movies are not great art.
Defining "great art" apparently isn't enough. We also have to figure out how to distinguish great art from trash.
But first, let's side aside a couple of issues regarding the word art.
In English, the word art has several meanings.
In one sense, art is used as synonym for craft. Any art-ifact made by an art-isan is a kind of art.
In another sense, any exercise of skill, any practice can be spoken of as an art.
The art of cooking. The art of war. The art of motorcycle maintenance.
In these senses, the practice and products of gamemaking obviously qualify as art.
But Ebert and Kael weren't using "art" in either of these senses. When Ebert refers to art, he means (and actually spells) Art with a capital A.art
Great art, fine art, or the term I prefer, sublime art.
Art that deeply rewards a lifetime of contemplation. Art as cultural monument. Art that's good for you. The kind of art that, in Ebert's words, makes us "more cultured, civilized and empathetic."
This kind of talk has earned Mr. Ebert that most deadly of anti-intellectual epithets, elitist.
The horror novelist Clive Barker led the mob, dismissing Ebert as an "arrogant old man," "pompous" and "high handed," adding, "If the experience moves you, some way or another, even if it just moves your bowels, I think it's worthy of some serious study."

Many people seem to share Barker's belief that the function of art is to elicit emotion, to make you feel things, to move people. Let's quickly dispose of this.
Last April, the US Supreme Court ruled that videos of small animals being deliberately stomped to death was a Constitutionally protected form of free speech.
Would you like to see one of these videos? If I press that play button, I promise you will experience strong emotion.
Stomp videos may be free speech, and they may make me feel things, but I reject them as art.
And I look forward to the High Court's opinion on whether or not video games are also a form of free speech.
The function of art is not merely to elicit emotion. A slip on a banana peel can do that. The function - not the purpose, the function - of all art, high or low, from Angry Birds to Hellraiser to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, is attraction.
Art has no practical purpose. Nobody needs art. Why would anyone bother to make art that nobody would be attracted to?
But how do we distinguish sublime attractions from the common attractions Pauline Kael dismissed as trash?
Why do Ebert and Kael believe that very few movies are sublime art?
How can Ebert predict with such confidence that no video game is ever likely to be sublime art, without even playing any?
And if he's wrong, if a game really can be sublime art, why hasn't anybody made one?
Such are the questions I pondered as I sat before Northcote's Chess Players.
It seemed to me, as I studied the painting, that there are three reasons why video games have failed to deliver sublime art. These reasons are neatly symbolized by the major elements of the painting.
The most obvious has been staring you in the face since two o'clock. It's not the chess players. It's not the golden boy, his silence or his secret, if he has one.
It's the dog.
We don't know who, if anyone, commissioned this painting from Northcote. But if it was a commission, we can say one thing with a high degree of certainty.
Whoever it was had plenty of money.
In the early 18th century, when The Chess Players was painted, there were generally two classes of people in Europe, the well-to-do and the near-starving. (Get used to it. We'll be there again soon.)
Most 18th century people didn't worry about buying paintings. It was all they could do to keep their families alive!
Things got better in the 19th century. Political changes, urbanization, improvements in mass production and education gave rise to what we now call the middle class.
These people had enough wealth to keep their families reasonably comfortable, with a little money left over for the occasional small luxury.
As their social standing improved, the petit-bourgeois wanted some of the things rich people enjoyed, like nice clothes, books and decorated homes.
So around the 1860s and 70s, a market developed catering to their limited budgets and tastes.
They still couldn't afford commissioned art. But there were plenty of second-rate painters happy to provide a quick knock-off to hang over the fireplace.
These paintings resembled great art. Picturesque landscapes, idyllic domestic scenes, portraits of celebrities.
The art dealers of Munich were apparently the first to nickname this new mass-market art.
Some scholars think it was a mispronunciation of the English word sketch. Others claim it was a contraction of a German verb that means "to make cheaply."
Whatever its origin, by the 1920s this nickname had become the international expression for those pink flamingos, velvet Elvises and adorable puppy dogs we all know and love as kitsch.
Quite a few books have been written about the aesthetics of kitsch. One of the best is by Tomas Kulka of Tel Aviv University.
Kulka argues that kitsch is not bad art. He sees it as a unique aesthetic category, a special kind of art, characterized by three properties:
One: Kitsch depicts objects or themes that are highly charged with stock emotions.
Kitsch is about simple feelings, universal ideas. Good and evil. Happy and sad.
Your response to these ideas is automatic. You know how you are supposed to feel about sad clowns, James Dean and horses running on a windswept beach.
In fact, part of the appeal of kitsch seems to lie precisely in recognizing that as you look at it, you're feeling the way you're supposed to. Kitsch validates you.
Two: The objects or themes depicted by kitsch are instantly and effortlessly identifiable.
Kitsch art is utterly conventional. There's never any doubt about what it is you're looking at. It's a leprechaun, and only a leprechaun. It's Santa Claus, and only Santa Claus.
Kitsch art is surface art. It's just what you expect.
Three (and most important): Kitsch does not substantially enrich our associations relating to the depicted objects or themes.
The last thing kitsch wants to be is challenging. Pure kitsch is never ironic, ambiguous, troubling, or innovative.
Kitsch art is popular art ... and nearly all popular art is kitsch.
Our mass-market culture is so thoroughly imbued with kitsch, it's the only kind of art many people ever experience.
Broadway musicals, theme parks, casinos, rock stars, major league sports, cable news ... all kitsch.
All advertising is kitsch. All media driven by advertising devolves into kitsch.
Sequels, spin-offs, knock-offs, reboots and adaptations from other media are automatically kitsch.
Politics thrives on kitsch.
And Roger Ebert has spent over forty years in dark theaters sitting through thousands and thousands of hours of shameless Hollywood kitsch.
Could anyone be more familiar with what happens when you apply commercial pressure to popular art?
Is there anyone on the planet more qualified to predict that video games will suffer the same fate?
Listen to this review of Call of Duty: Black Ops published in the New York Times a few days after it was released last December:
"I never play games twice. But Call of Duty: Black Ops has made a very happy liar out of me ... I wanted to try to assassinate Fidel Castro ... again. And break out of a Soviet prison camp ... again. And pilot a gunboat through the Mekong Delta again, shooting up sampans while listening to "Sympathy for the Devil" ... The cold war was never so much fun ... Black Ops ... does not really innovate, but it doesn't have to. Rather, it reflects a keen intelligence and a rigorous, disciplined understanding of each individual element of modern game design ... It then executes and delivers ... in a way that demonstrates how well oiled a game-making machine Robert A. Kotick, Activision's chief executive, has created."
Call of Duty: Black Ops made more money faster than any entertainment product in history.
How? By depicting instantly identifiable themes, highly charged with stock emotions. By not trying to enrich players' associations with those themes. By not innovating.
Video games are an industry. You are attending a giant industry conference. Industries make products.
Video game products contain plenty of art, but it's product art, which is to say, kitsch art.
Kitsch art is not bad art. It's commercial art. Art designed to be sold, easily and in quantity. And the bigger the audience, the kitschier it's gonna get.
Kitsch is a risk-reduction strategy, time-tested and good for business.
Kitsch is robust. Details of execution don't matter very much. You can change stuff without affecting its utility.
Sublime art is fragile. It lives or dies in the details. There's nothing superfluous or out of place.
As author C.S. Lewis wrote, "That word and no other in that place and no other."
Kitsch is like Duchamp's urinal. You flush it when you're done using it. Kitsch is fundamentally standard, and when standards change, it becomes first irrelevant, then corny, and finally the subject of nostalgia.
Sublime art is either always relevant, or not at all. It is never the subject of nostalgia, but often the subject of discovery.
Kitsch can be brilliantly executed, wonderfully entertaining, and culturally significant. It is often mistaken for great art and awarded with honors, especially by those industries that specialize in it.
One way to deal with the overwhelming prevalence of kitsch is to celebrate it.
While you're here in the city, take a trolley up to the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill.
Down in the sub-sub-basement you'll find one of best surviving examples of '40s tiki kitsch: The Tonga Room.
The food in the Tonga Room is practically inedible. But after the second faux-Polynesian umbrella cocktail served in a real pineapple, you won't care.
In the middle of the room there's an artificial pond with a little island that floats around. A band on the island plays tinkly pop music.
Here's the best part. Every hour there's a simulated tropical thunderstorm. It starts to rain around the edges of the pond!
The Tonga Room is delightful. I smile when I walk in there, and I'm smiling even more when I leave.
The technical term for the celebration of kitsch is camp.
Welcome to San Francisco, the camp capitol of the world.
Ultimately, camp is an evasive strategy. Camp embraces kitsch, but refuses to commit to the risk of creating art.
We shouldn't expect publicly traded game publishers to produce anything but kitsch.
But what about the indies? Indies are small and nimble. Their only stockholders are the employees. They can afford risk creating art, right?
That's the fantasy. In reality, indies are under the same commercial pressure as the big studios.
They have a little more wiggle room for innovation and risk. But only a little.
And if they fail, they have no cushion. If anything, there's even more pressure never to fail.
As a result, most indies secretly, or not so secretly, aspire to produce authentic-looking kitsch. Kitsch with a edge, if they're good, but kitsch nonetheless.
The well-oiled game-making machines manufacture kitsch. Indies struggle to imitate them. Who's left to create sublime art?
The people who create art anyway. The artists. If anyone is going to pwn Roger Ebert, they'll probably be the ones to do it.
There is genuine hope there, but there is also a subtle danger.
If you consciously set out trying to make an "art game," it's possible that you will instead create an arty game, a game with the trappings of sublime art.
Solemn themes. Classical music. Literary quotations. Participation by artistic celebrities from other media. These things don't necessarily make a game artistic.
I should know. I've tried them all.
But this warning should not be taken as an excuse never to try. Many embarrassing failures would be worth the effort if they culminated in a single authentic work of art.
The dog is in the painting because whoever paid for the painting demanded a dog!
But the kitsch that dogs our industry isn't the only reason we've failed to produce sublime art. Consider again the two chess players, masters of the game.
All art forms depend on mastery.
Painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, filmmakers and architects all require tools, instruction and years and years of hard actual practice.
We game developers are no different. But we are at a distinct disadvantage.
The tools and technology we work with are, and always have been, slippery.
In 1894, Thomas Edison and William Dickson introduced an improved version of the Kinetoscope. It used plastic film 35 millimeters wide, perforated on both sides. Each image frame occupied four perforations. The film ran vertically through the camera and projector at a speed of about 16 frames per second.
Within a few years, Edison's 35mm film format became the worldwide de facto standard.
Cameras and projectors improved. A few minor changes were made for the introduction of sound.
But the basic format, the fundamental engineering parameters controlling the design, production, distribution and exhibition of movies, remained virtually unchanged for over 115 years.
Compare this to the first four decades of video gaming.
Dozens of computer architectures. Seven generations of consoles. Zero uniformity in processing power, memory, resolution, color space or audio. A bewildering range of platforms, from cell phones to pimped up Alienwares.
Now let's talk about the business of video games.
During the five years I worked at Lucasfilm, the management of the games division changed six times.
Acquisitions, layoffs, delays, cancellations, closing studio doors, lawsuits ... you've all been there.
How can a potential artist hope to accumulate any deep practice in this maelstrom?
[Imitating an Italian prima donna] "How can we create in such an atmosphere?!?"
The third reason why video games have failed as sublime art is the most subtle, the most speculative, and maybe the most important.
Is there, as Roger Ebert suggested, a structural, intrinsic reason why video games cannot be sublime art?
Let's turn again to the golden boy. As you meet his haughty gaze, let me read you some of the things Roger Ebert has written about video games and art.
"I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist."
"Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices."
"Video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic."
At one point, Clive Barker pleaded, "I'm just saying that gaming is a great way to do what we as human beings need to do all the time -- to take ourselves away from the oppressive facts of our lives and go somewhere where we have our own control."
Ebert's retort to this was icy. "I do not have a need 'all the time' to take myself away from the oppressive facts of my life, however oppressive they may be, in order to go somewhere where I have control. I need to stay here and take control."
These quotes are boulder-size clues to Ebert's sensibilities.
He objects to the idea of self-directed effort as a means of experiencing art. He sees the intention of a single artist as primary. He speaks of inevitability. He's jealous of his free time, those 'precious hours' he has left for cultivation. He sees art not as an escape from life, but as a way to understand and accept life as it is.
No doubt about it. Roger Ebert is, like me, a hopeless Romantic.

Arthur Schopenhauer is the philosopher most closely associated with Romanticism.
You think Roger Ebert's a curmudgeon? Wait till you meet Schopenhauer.
When he was appointed lecturer at the University of Berlin in 1820, the faculty included the world-famous philosopher Georg Hegel.
The young Schopenhauer considered Hegel to be "a clumsy charlatan." He scheduled his lectures at exactly the same time as Hegel's to draw his students away.
It didn't work. His classroom was empty. He eventually left academia in disgust.
Schopenhauer once wrote that marriage is like "reaching blindfolded into a sack hoping to find an eel among the snakes."
He was also an atheist. He did not believe in a personal, omnipotent God.
Instead, Schopenhauer believed that the essence of the universe is Being: a blind, irrational, unquenchable thirst to exist he called Wille zum Leben, and that everything we perceive is a representation of this Will to Live.
Because we ourselves are products of Will, we spend most of our lives trapped in a cycle of striving and boredom.
We're constantly willing ourselves to attain our goals, and when we do attain them, we're disappointed and move on to something else, again and again, until the ultimate disappointment of death.
To Schopenhauer, free will and real choice were cruel illusions, and desire a prison.
Schopenhauer does have a reputation for being pessimistic. But he really wasn't. Because he also believed that there's a way to leap off the wheel of desire.
That way is the contemplation - the contemplation - of sublime art.
Sublime art is the door to a perspective on reality that transcends Will.
It frees us from the agony of contingency and causality, and give us a brief, precious glimpse of what we really are, one thing, already complete, and perfectly ambiguous.
Bob Dylan echoed Schopenhauer when he said that the purpose of art is to stop time.
To Schopenhauer, the creation of sublime art was the noblest of human undertakings, and artists, especially musicians, were the high priests of civilization.
Not surprisingly, a lot of 19th and 20th century artists really liked this guy.
Brahms, Tolstoy, Mahler, Proust, Einstein, Freud and Jung were all strongly influenced by Schopenhauer. Richard Wagner was practically a disciple.
If you could go back and ask Schopenhauer whether or not a game, any game, could become a sublime work of art, how would he respond?
He'd probably just pat you on the shoulder, shake his head and chuckle. Why is this?
As you all know, games are about choices. Sid Meier famously defined games as "a series of interesting choices."
And choice is the most fundamental expression of Will.
How can an activity motivated by decisions, striving, goals and competition, a deliberate concentration of the force of Will, be used to transcend Will itself?
You might as well try to smother a flame with oxygen.
Game designers are taught that the ideal player experience is something called flow.
Flow is that magical state of highly focused motivation, a kind of skating on the fine edge of effort and challenge.
Flow leads to a feeling of euphoric exhilaration.

Bow before Csikszentmihalyi and Poppins, Prophets of Flow!
Gameflow is work made fun! Flow keeps you joyfully working, even in your free time!
Gameflow will be the harness of the New Labor class.
Flow is painless effort. But pain management is not the business of art.
Entrancement is not insight.
Flow is an-aesthetic.
In my Digital Game Design I class, I define "play" as superfluous activity.
I define a "toy" as something that elicits play, and a "game" as a toy with rules and a goal.
Games are purposeful. They are defined as the exercise of choice and will towards a self-maximizing goal.
But sublime art is like a toy. It elicits play in the soul. The pleasure we get from it lies precisely in the fact that it has no rules, no goal, no purpose.
Oscar Wilde was not being flippant when we wrote, "All art is quite useless."
If the Romantics were right, if the purpose of sublime art is to solve the mystery of choice, it's hard to see how goal-chasing can be anything but a distraction.
We can admire an elegant game design from the outside, like a museum game under glass.
But once you enter Huizinga's magic circle and start groping at preferences, the attitude of calm, radical acceptance necessary to cultivate insight is lost.
The concert pianist Glenn Gould characterized the Romantic conception of art most vividly when he wrote, "The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline, but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."
The conference program promised that I would offer you my own definition of art. Here it is, in all its moldy old Romantic splendor:
Sublime art is the still evocation of the inexpressible.
If these definitions of art do not speak to you, ignore them. Time is on your side.
But if they do speak to you, beware. You, too, may someday be dismissed as a tiresome old fool who doesn't "get it."
Games have been good to me. I love playing them, and I love giving my students a space to learn about them.
An hour or two or spent playing Defense Grid or Plants vs Zombies isn't a waste of time. There's nothing wrong with recreation. We need it. I need it. It's good for me!
But when I feel the need for reflection, for insight, wisdom or consolation, I turn my computers off.
These needs are the ambit of the sublime arts, which are inspired and informed by philosophy, and by faith.
All sublime art is devotional.
Twenty-four game developer's conferences ago, I sat in Chris Crawford's living room together with a few dozen other young hopefuls, and imagined a future in which video games would be recognized as a great art form, as important as the movies they reviewed every week on Siskel and Ebert.
Look at us! Video games are now bigger than movies!
But they didn't need to be great art to get here. They just needed to be great fun.
You could argue that this kitschy little dog spoils the effect of Northcote's painting. But I've come to kind of like the little guy. He keeps the chess players and the golden boy from taking themselves too seriously.
I'm told that the Fairmont is tearing down the old Tonga Room pretty soon to make way for some fancy new condos.
What do you say we all head up there one more time, raise a few Mai Tais to Roger Ebert, share a few laughs ... and listen to the rain?
Categories:
63 Comments
Great post, full of interesting views.
But I have to ask, why must video games be judged on the artistic merit of specifics such as mechanics and rules?
We don't judge a film on the polish of the canister, or the design aspects of the promotional poster. We don't judge a book on the experience of turning the pages.
Mechanics and rules can form the core of a game, but often they can also be the transparent delivery mechanism for the greater experience.
The experience of chess is not authored. The player is not directed through an experience. It is unfair to imply that video games offer little more than pretty backgrounds.
Boon Cotter | March 15, 2011 8:17 PM
This is a great article!
I believe this debate is far from over, but is always refreshing to hear a more traditional approach to art-talk in a media that tends almost exclusively to post- modernist views.
sry 4 the english, im from argentina :P
juan milanese | March 15, 2011 10:04 PM
I think this is a great article, and one that needed to be written. I feel Ebert was hard done by, and if anything I was looking for a more thorough examination of games from an Ebert that had played them. This article is that thorough examination, and it answers a lot of questions.
However, I think you are too dismissive of game flow as not having insight. Why do the developers of Ikaruga describe it as Zen meditation? Is Zen not an examination of our lives outside will?
While it may seem contradictory, I do believe that making choices in quick succession while in flow can lead to a situation where the player is not exercising her will at all -- I believe that it can lead to sublime art. Moreover, I think that this kind of fast decision making is something which has not existed prior to electronic games.
So I applaud you for a great defense, but for me the argument is not over.
Sunny Kalsi | March 15, 2011 10:29 PM
I think it's a great article -- lots of very good points, I especially enjoyed the ones about kitsch. However, I have some things I would like to discuss.
First of all, why do I get the feeling that Ebert and Moriarty refer mostly (except for Call of Duty) to indie or casual games? Flower, Plant vs Zombies, Angry Birds... If those are the examples of video games that they acknowledge, then it's a bit biased.
To my mind, what makes video games strong candidates for works of art is the fact that they feature a narrative, much like movies or novels. (Note that we don't compare video games with sculpture or architecture, but with novels and movies...)
That's to my mind where the strongest argument in favor of video games lies. Angry Birds may seem to those people a mere entertainment, a game without a world-changing perspective on the world, "designed to waste the gamer's time"; but how about Deus Ex and Max Payne? Those two games have a very well-developed and complex plot, a very cinematographic narrative, characters that are more developed than usual -- to be more precise: the plot of Max Payne is quite basic, but heightened by the depiction of the main character's state of mind and the numerous cinematographic references, and Deus Ex has a complex and intricate plot and a very well-designed world. To my mind, those games are what's the closest to art -- maybe out of personal taste, but I could make pretty strong arguments for it (for instance, Max Payne is a very, very linear game driven by its plot -- to me, it's not interactive in the sense that the player has no input, but just has to pass a series of challenges to keep the story going).
Even then, how about interactive movies that were the rage in the 1990s, using this new format called CD-ROM? I could make an interactive movie with one plot and no branches (in other words, no "creative" player input): would that be a game, a movie? Would that be art, or not? And to my mind, if you can take something and push it a little further so that it becomes indistinguishable from art, then it is that it's art.
Lastly, the more convincing argument may be actually made by interactive fiction -- aka text adventures. They are games, no doubt about that; but recently (with the contemporary scene that emerged after the death of Infocom) games seem to be more and more focused on narration and be a little lighter on puzzles: I feel that one could easily design a game that is merely a novel in disguise. More importantly, some writers pushed the literature genre to levels of "reader input" well beyond the level it had been before: how about Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes? How about gamebooks, as well: are they literature, or games? Or both? But how could they be art or non-art simultaneously?
Another argument I would object to is that "video games are not art because they are not great". To me, art has a definition that you can apply to anything, regardless of quality: really bad fan fictions are art. So I wouldn't mind calling video games art even if they are not perceived as good as Proust's novels: to me, art has no intrisic value (even though I love great art), it is just something that humans do without seemingly a purpose else than its own contemplation or experience.
But maybe I'm misleaded here: maybe that (and Brian makes a great point about it in his apology) some works are art and some are not even if they belong in the same "category"? (as in a movie can be art while another is not) But it seems extremely subjective to me, and it seems that we confuse "art" and "great art" here (without mentioning the possibilities of being called elists while we do that).
Anyway. Interesting debate. I'd like to see some game designers replying to Ebert saying "Challenge accepted. Prepare to have you mind blown." ;)
mule hollandaise | March 15, 2011 11:25 PM
In my opinion, comparing video games to books or movies misses the point completely. Games are much more comparable to performing arts, in which the player explores the confines of game mechanics in the same way that an actor explores the confines of the role they are portraying.
To claim that this is not art is akin to saying that in movies, the art is only in the script. If one cannot honor the contributions of all the individual artists collaborating in such a project as art, then games cannot easily be, that's true.
unwesen | March 16, 2011 4:28 AM
Perhaps a game of chess cannot be considered art, but what about examples such the Lewis Chess Set? A priceless set of ivory and whale tooth carved pieces dating back to the 12th century.
If the set can be considered art, then why not beautifully rendered 3d models of a chess computer game? The shapes lovingly carved out of vertices and edges, the textures carefully painted by hand? If the individual parts can potentially be art, why not the sum of their parts?
Ryan | March 16, 2011 5:37 AM
Oh, good fucking grief.
"Video games are an industry. You are attending a giant industry conference. Industries make products."
Paintings were and are, an industry. Every painter has either made their art to be sold, or to gain the financial support of some patron.
Music, likewise.
And if you cannot find a video game that can draw emotion from the user, or serve both as a game experience AND a commentary on life, or philosophy, then you are simply not looking.
Are all games, or even most games, "high art" that you would place in a museum? Probably not, if only because museums are by definition not interactive; the "art" is almost always not to be touched, held under glass or otherwise protected.
By the same token, however, for every "masterpiece" of art, there are a thousand kitschy, almost-worthless paintings and prints that get recreated by the assload and sold at "trendy, hipster" stores like Ikea or Target. And for every really good, groundbreaking, breathtaking piece of musical theater, you have at least a hundred throwaway shows like the craptacular "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark."
To attack video games because every single one is not a major "amazing high art" festival is to miss the point, just as one shouldn't attack novels on the basis that naughty pulp sex fiction and cheesy detective novels outnumber the "recommended college reading list" by 100,000 to 1.
Mike | March 16, 2011 6:02 AM
Whatever Art is supposed to be, my limited knowledge of art history has made me realise that it is actually Used as a branding term that each new generation of media will try to appropriate for itself in order to satisfy some snobbish sense of elitism.
All the following arguments have historically been used to deny the term "Art" to a category of media:
- Art Nouveau is not art because it is commercial (as though Renaissance artists were not paid for their work?).
- Modern Art is not art because it's random nonsense.
- Only realism is Art.
- Realism is not Art because it is not creative.
- Photography is not Art because Art has to be drawn.
- Digital art is not Art because... just because it's obviously inferior to traditional Art.
- Anime can't be art because it is commercial, mass-produced and generic (tell that to Hayao Miyazaki)
- Now, I agree that most people who draw fanarts aren't exactly good enough to produce museum work, but how is that conceptually different from Renaissance artists drawing scenes from Greek mythology, from the Bible or just of famous people at the time?
- blablabla stuff about how something has to last. Well I can say this: many old paintings, books and movies have aged very, very badly. It'd be considered crap if someone nowadays produced the exact same work. Nobody dares to say anything because it's in a museum or because it was great at the Time. Hindu sand painting and modern performances don't "last" either, so what?
There's a lot of branding at work. As a kid I was a snob who only respected classical music. After growing up some I found that the closest equivalent was actually game music. I even made my mom listen to the opening song of Super Smash Bros. Brawl once, and even though I told her what it was she thought that perhaps the composer had re-arranged classical music pieces to make that. However, this piece will never get any historical recognition, just because it was "gaming" music.
In the same way, games have had visual moments that truly left an impression on me (Myst, and I often wished I could have played Ico and Okami). Some games nowadays have storylines to rival quite a few movies or books, like horror games. Bioshock lets you choose between good and evil actions, but you have to face the consequences.
Basically, as a medium, games do have the potential to deliver compelling storylines. And unlike books, it gives you the possibility of making you think by making you face the consequences of your choices.
This potential hasn't been properly exploited yet, but that's also because the technology hasn't been around that long. In Most media, the vast majority of works won't be thought highly off except as a means of nearly mindless entertainment. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have the potential to be something more.
Valerie | March 16, 2011 7:03 AM
I enjoyed the apology, and agree with many of your points; however, I think the whole argument for and against games as art is misplaced. True, chess itself is not art, but many of the matches "performed" by chess masters are endlessly reviewed as great works themselves. I personally don't consider these reviews as simple study or nostalgia; the results, mechanics, and rules are already well understood. No, these matches are re-enacted, in a sense, specifically for their subtlety and can be appreciated for the nuances of their play, for the timing and intentions of players, all of which could be argued is of no inherent value.
Video games provide a new medium for artists to engage. The game itself is not the art-ifact, beyond its kitsch nature as you argue, but rather the specific experience of a master player is the true work of art and we as a community can and do recognize it when we see. Often we simply enjoy our own limited talents, or perhaps those of our friends and gaming frenemies, in exercising each new game as a medium. I would compare playing some games to our modest attempts at art with crayons, or clay, or paper cutouts; but with practice, and guidance, and of course some natural talent, a few gaming geniuses emerge. I will never have the skill of Fatal1ty in FPS games, or the dedication needed to dominate Starcraft tournaments, but I do recognize it when I see it and appreciate it for more than the simple entertainment and instructional value it might provide.
So, no, I don't believe any video game has achieved the level of sublime art, but I do suspect I've encountered it while playing!
Chris | March 16, 2011 7:33 AM
Here we go again....
Games and art represent two DIFFERENT APPLICATIONS OF DIFFERENT BEHAVIOUR, based on their use and place within the English language.
Art and games, although different, ARE, however, COMPATIBLE - in that games can be made USING art itself - but because they can and do represent two separate things, they do not define each other.
For this reason, any game which USES art - such as video/board/card games etc., uses another word in combination with the word game, to describe such media being used.
The underlying problem we currently have, however, is that the word game is not fully recognised or understood for WHAT it represents in a manner that is consistent with its use - independently of such (further) applications.
There is very good reason for that, however - the basis of which can be found here:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DarrenTomlyn/20110314/7218/Starting_Again__Part_1_Problems_With_The_Word_Game.php
Darren Tomlyn | March 16, 2011 9:27 AM
"Sublime art is the still evocation of the inexpressible"...
Videogames are a pretty good source of the inexpressible. Maybe the best source of the inexpressible mankind has ever gotten its hands on... Forty years on, there still isn't a consensual vocabulary for describing the medium or the experiences it might ellicit. Film and photography readily broke down into myriad, accepted verbiage and jargon, but videogames... the stuff they are made of cannot fit -- comfortably, usefully -- into words.
Back in the days of the Ebert affair everybody had their own "reading list" of videogames they meant to show Mr. Ebert to turn him. They should have shown him Garry's Mod, and said -- "Look, this isn't the actual art exhibition; it's the echoing hallways that lead up to it. Videogames aren't art: every play-session is an art-school, every title an art movement, and every truly engaged, invested gamer an artist. Put that in your pipe and smoke it."
In "The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Social Change", David Harvey states that the spontaneous production of art objects by even the smallest exchange of user and object ‘accentuate volatility and ephemerality of fashions, products, production techniques, ideas and ideologies, values and established practices’. This is what gave us postmodernity, or rather postmodern art. This is what gave us the entire art paradigm we currently experience as a species. Spontaneous production of art objects by the smallest exchange between user and object? This is precisely what we are getting from something like Garry's mod, and by extension most inspired works of game design and implementation. Videogames are an infinite crucible of postmodern art (even when they are little too self-conscious and try to sell overwroght kitschyness as a product). A videogame is not an "art object"; it's an "art environment"... what we take away from them is art... Videogame art is what strikes you, as you contemplate your play experience, and what it means to who you are, as a human, as you wash the dishes at home on a weekday night and think back (or rather "feel back") to some Ukranian emergent tour de force you've been contemplating, like a Zen monk up a mountain, for the entirety of last weekend.
Pedro Neves | March 16, 2011 11:02 AM
There are many aspects of this argument that appear at odds with one another, or just placed there for a desired emotional response. I'll step through one by one.
1. "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers."
sure, but it's been what, 40 years?
Also, we haven't yet gathered the academic language to even discuss video games, so how could we possibly have a conversation about what game is worth of comparison or not?
I would contend that Super Mario Brothers for NES was a culturally transformative and compelling work of staggering genius (and sublime art that gives me something new every time I return to it), but I have no way to argue that academically (like it or not, it's the academics who tend to make these distinctions).
Not to mention the argument "This can never happen because it hasn't happened yet" is so obviously logically flawed I don't know how to address it further.
Can we please be done with this point?
2. "it would never even occur to me to compare them to the treasures of world literature, painting or music."
sure, and thats your opinion, and as stated above it's fortunately not your job. If you want to talk about non sublime art sure, but sublime art is unfortunately become the definition of the academics and museums. I hate to admit this fact myself, but thats how things go. Sure you can have punk practitioners who claim that they are doing art, and their small circle believes them, and then eventually the academics and the museums claim this to be true to, and then it is.
Now I'm not saying everyone has to rely on the academic community for their art definitions, in fact, that's clearly a dangerous biased world, but Moriarty appears to be discussing sublime art from this perspective, so I'll formulate my response to fit what he is talking about.
3. "Why are some people in this industry so anxious to wrap themselves in the mantle of great art?"
We're not. Sublime art isn't a genre, it's not a medium. It's an impact. Great art is to say that a work is astonishing, you even define it yourself later: "Sublime art is the still evocation of the inexpressible."
How could we not strive to be that?
To not aspire to this is to undermine the medium, ANY medium.
4. "Nowhere in 25 centuries of philosophy did I find a single author who regarded games or sports as a form of art."
Look harder. Did you check out Wittgenstein?
5. "These are remembered chiefly by art historians and academics, except for Fluxus, which is famous because one of its members married a Beatle."
Unfortunately when you're discussing sublime art as you see in museums, art historians and academics are those that you have to go to. Moriarty is riding a confusing line here, he claims to be discussing sublime art, but then refers to only his personal preference in sublime art. If we're talking about personal preferences, than sublime art is no different than art, it's just what we on our own believe.
Also, this is certainly insulting of fluxus, which is 'not' chiefly remembered because of Ono. Other notable fluxus participants include Nam June Paik ("Draw a line and follow it") as well as the experimental composers John Cage and La Monte Young.
Try and find someone who would argue that John Cage is only famous because he was in an art movement that involved a member who married a Beatle.
6. "Suggesting that a game could be great art is radical."
yes. radical things happen in contemporary art all the time. Some would argue we need more radical things, and that traditional institutions are far to conservative. This is a good thing. Look at net art. GWEI is a good example of compelling net art (at least to me).
7. "On the other hand, the idea of "great art" is itself somewhat radical. It dates back only about 500 years."
so then why spend so much time looking at 25 centuries of philosophy?
8. But there's a big difference. Photography and cinema were new technologies.
This is actually not a big difference.
New technologies make it obvious that it's tricky to understand and accept new forms of art work, but controversy over what is or is not art crops up all the time within existing fields. Just look at abstract painting, or modern and post modern sculpture. Later on in this very speech Moriarty claims duchamp's Urinal is not art, citing an existing controversy in a field that's been around since the dawn of humanity.
It's the ideas behind art that have taken the forefront. We're moving away from the idea of art as object, and towards art as concept. Just like when Moriarty reads a great work of american literature, it's not the book itself that is the work, it's the ideas contained within. He himself cites this later in his talk.
9. "If Chess and Go, arguably the two greatest games in history, have never been regarded as works of art, why should Missile Command?"
There are many that would arguer that Chess and Go ARE great art.
10. "A number of so-called performance artists have been arrested for trying to pee in these replicas."
Here Moriarty cites performance art, another 'technology' that has existed for thousands of years and yet is often cited for controversy.
11. "Instead of aesthetic value, the emphasis shifted to novelty value."
This is Moriarty's opinion. If all sculpture about thinking is novelty, how can a piece of art ever hope to rival a great american novel. This statement has no regard to the context's in which these works are produced.
12. "Suppose I design a platformer with backgrounds by Michelangelo, black and white characters from Ingmar Bergman movies, pop-up quotations from Shakespeare and music from The Well-Tempered Clavier. I call it All Your Art Is Belong to Us!"
Hilarious but not art. Those who would argue this are barking up the wrong tree. Art can be in something that is not art. Is my home art if I have a van Gogh painting in it? Obviously not
13. "But can an arrangement of mechanics and affordances, rules and goals, itself constitute a work of art?"
Yes. Moriarty has already (by what authority?) dismissed Fluxus, but how about Sol Lewitt?
but this doesn't matter because….
14. "Does it even make sense to speak of mechanics and affordances apart from presentation? Isn't it all one piece?"
No it does not. You cannot define games as art by defining all of the smaller components as art. The fact that games cannot be piecemeal compared to another 'approved' art form is a strength, not a weakness.
15. Next come a number of poor arguments for the function of art which appear to be included just to illicit audience reaction, so I'll skip over them. Also the main proponent of games as art appears to be Clive Barker, a Horror Novelist. It would have been nice if Moriarty had actually approached an academic or art historian for their opinions on the matter, many of whom attended the Art History of Games Conference last year. Clive seems like an easy target. This boils down to two people, both critically unqualified to talk about what is and is not sublime art from an art historical perspective, throwing rocks at each other. Easy target for Moriarty.
16. Call of Duty: Black Ops is not a game anyone is arguing is great art. Hell, many people wouldn't even argue that it's a great game.
17. "Kitsch art is not bad art. It's commercial art. Art designed to be sold, easily and in quantity."
Moriarty has just redefined Kitsch to describe the Rococo, a well received and clearly artistic major european art movement.
18. "Sublime art is fragile. It lives or dies in the details. There's nothing superfluous or out of place."
Moriarty appears to be attempting to simultaneously argue that Kitsch is anything poplar, created for consumption (so all games are Kitsch because they care about money), but also that Kitsch is work done without care for details (suddenly the commissioned chess painting is okay because it does care about details.. but game developers don't? Where was this part of the definition when he was slamming games?)
He also appears to equate 'work' to 'details'. Every aspect of Duchamp's urinal was thought through, that piece is filled with care, even if it wasn't 'worked' extensively.
19. "In reality, indies are under the same commercial pressure as the big studios."
So are quite literally all artists, movie makers, and writers.
20. "If you consciously set out trying to make an "art game," it's possible that you will instead create an arty game, a game with the trappings of sublime art."
The same is true if you consciously set out trying to make art.
Most great artists set out just to make, and what they make is called great art by others.
21. "Solemn themes. Classical music. Literary quotations. Participation by artistic celebrities from other media. These things don't necessarily make a game artistic."
Of course not. Nor do they make art artistic. For sure they make us more likely to believe something is artistic (and this is dangerous). Indeed, this is the difference between Comedy and Tragedy as defined by plays.
How many great works of playwriting do you know that are Comedies? There are some, but I bet more are Tragedies.
22. "The tools and technology we work with are, and always have been, slippery."
True, and Moriarty is right this does make it harder. I would argue though that a greater difficulty has been the technological hurdle of making games themselves. The learnable skills required are far beyond any other field (the only comparison I can think of is architecture).
Either way this only serves to provide one more reason why classification is difficult, and isn't really an argument that has anything to do with games possibly ever being art or not
23. "I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist."
Nobody playing video games is changing them. Players are operating within a very constrained world that is structured by the artist, if that is the case.
24. "Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices."
No, that is essay. Art seeks to lead you towards questions. Art is open ended. If Art sought to lead you towards an inevitable conclusion it would only be worth understanding once.
25. "How can an activity motivated by decisions, striving, goals and competition, a deliberate concentration of the force of Will, be used to transcend Will itself?"
According to Schopenhauer, in life, we believe to be making choices that we are not, is not a game the clearest manifestation of that? Especially a digital game where the rules are enforced and can change any time? How can something that has the capacity to mirror life to such a degree not be capable of being art? Is that not the role of art, the goal that we strive for as artists? To ask these questions that give a view on life, on our existence?
Beyond that, not all games have goals and competition. Look at Jason Roher's oft cited Passage. That game has a start and an end, but no goals but those you make for yourself.
26. Flow
Yes, Flow is often sought after as an idea player state when making games. Not sure what this has to do with anything.
When watching a great movie or reading a great book I often reach Flow as well. This can even happen when I look at a great painting.
27. "But once you enter Huizinga's magic circle and start groping at preferences, the attitude of calm, radical acceptance necessary to cultivate insight is lost."
What about games that play with the boundaries of that magic circle? Is this not where the truly sublime art lies?
If we apply the magic circle to paintings, movies, or books, is not the art in the spaces where we don't know where the medium ends and our life begins? Where the content bleeds out of the frame and into our existence?
28. "The justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline, but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity."
This sounds an awful lot like Chess and Go.
29. "Sublime art is the still evocation of the inexpressible."
I am not sure what this definition means. Does the 'still' part exclude movies and performance art? If not, what in this definition rejects games? Are they incapable of evoking the inexpressible?
Zach Gage | March 16, 2011 11:39 AM
Counterpoint: art is subjective. Just because you don't think it is art, that doesn't mean that it isn't. Just as some people like sports, others don't. They are fully entitled to their opinions. You can state that you yourself do not believe that video games are art, but stating your opinion as a fact is rather misleading and inaccurate.
I think that paintings and statues, although liked and regarded as art by many, are boring and dull (and many of them rather ugly). I don't believe that they're art. That's just my opinion, though.
chekrsupreme | March 16, 2011 11:49 AM
OK, so I'm an art historian and a curator. With real degrees, cred, experience, and everything.
Zach brought up a lot of really excellent points, and while I feel COMPELLED to be just as thorough, I'm worried that I'll make you all TL;DR.
The most important thing I want to share though, is that Moriarty is rehashing something called "Avant Garde and Kitsch," by this dude Clement Greenberg. To put things very simply, this text dominated art historical discourse for the past 50 years, and Greenberg had a reputation for being very powerful, and very tyrannical.
Greenberg's premise that art needed to sublime and that only "low art" (kitsch) was representational was destructive fro a bunch of reasons:
a) It meant that only curators and art historians, not the artists or their publics, were vested with the power to determine what art was, and what it meant.
b) Greenberg's thesis devalued political art, and art that expressed the nature of individual experience, preferencing abstract work. Greenberg's thesis was used as a power grab by the US government in order to delegitimize political art that directly or indirectly challenged US policy. (http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/04/23/reviews/000423.23joffet.html)
So what I'm trying to say is that our ideas about what makes an artwork, or what makes something sacred, is usually directly associated with political and economic distributions of power, and it's very lucrative/convenient to mask all that by creating levels of privilege and illusions intended to keep the majority of people thinking that they don't know about art, or that it's somehow too good or too expensive for them to have opinions on.
I'm of the belief that art is awesome because, aside from the fact that it sometimes looks cool/makes us feel things, it's a CULTURAL LENS. Whether we like an artwork or not, the sheer fact that we can talk about it as a product of various cultural, chronological, material, experiential, social (etc) factors can teach us a lot of cool, worthwhile things.
I could talk about this all day, but it's important for me to mention that within the contemporary art community (note: neither Moriarty nor Ebert are art historians), we've already accepted artists' games as well, art. It's been going on for a while. We're not having the "can videogames be art?" discussion, because, well, we've checked our facts and done the required reading. It's a done deal. Experience counts.
HOWEVER, it's really important that we open up the discussion about art and museums to ACTUAL PEOPLE LIKE YOU GUYS, and not just monocle-wearing-pinkies-in-the-air-monopoly-men. And I wanted to let you know that arts professionals like me (and many, many others) want to know about what you think. We want to make you feel like museums are yours. We recognize that we've spent hundreds and hundreds of years monopolizing the conversation on art, and I know I really sincerely hope that games can serve as a point of entry for you to have your say.
Whoops, there goes my ambition to avoid that whole TL;DR situation...
Sarah Brin | March 16, 2011 12:13 PM
I have to admit, I only got about a quarter of the way in when I decided to make this comment. Right around your hypothetical platform game.
That being said, from what I can tell, there's a huge flaw in your argument. You say that if chess is not art, and chess is a game, then no game can ever be art. The problem here, is that chess has no narrative. You can make one up yourself if you want I suppose, pretending the King to be some particular person and so on. But video games have the potential to tell a story, to have meaning.
Let's suppose a famous writer/director (for example, Chris Nolan) wrote a screenplay. Now, let us suppose that instead of hiring a crew and actors, he worked with a team of video game designers to create a video game that played out that screenplay, down to the last description (the tone used in the voice acting, the angles and lighting and coloring of the environments, etc.). So now, this game gives the user the same experience that the non-existent movie (that would have been based on the same screenplay) would have provided, with the only exception being that the player is interacting physically with the medium. The events still play out in the same way. The only thing that varies is how the player chooses to go about advancing the story (choosing the path from A to B, but those points are still fixed). The variations in those paths are irrelevant to the story. This is necessarily the case, because if the director had wanted a detail to be a certain way, he would have forced it to be. If the character is meant to drive from location A to B, the player would not be given the option of walking, for example. If the antagonist is meant to be killed by a sword driven through his heart, the player would not be given a gun in the battle.
I just can't see any reasoning to the argument that a story told through the medium of video games is any different from a story told through any other medium.
Matt | March 16, 2011 12:59 PM
The Game Idea referenced above by Matt exists as an actual game. It's called Photopia, and it's a text adventure written by Adam Cadre.
If this concept sounds interesting to anyone, I highly recommend playing it.
http://www.wurb.com/if/game/255
Zach Gage | March 16, 2011 1:05 PM
So the components being art cant elevate the whole work to art? and if it's commercially distributed, it invalidates it, even somewhat?
OK: which song in Sgt. Peppers isn't art? In other words, is a part of it not artistic because that part makes it a commercial success? Or does it invalidate the whole because it was printed millions of times?
could a part of it transcend the whole? Are the artists themselves the only keepers of defining if it's art or not? and lastly, is chess or go simply not considered art because we don't have an author?
It's so hard to disagree with the conclusion of this apology, but I do. Not defending games as always producing art, but It is a medium wich can and will make sublime art.
Keyvan Acosta | March 16, 2011 1:09 PM
I've always felt that art is anything that is created through the application of skill in order to evoke response. Poor artists attempt to dictate that response, good artists attempt only to evoke the response within themselves, and great artists manage to evoke a response in others that is similar to that which they evoked in themselves. That being said . . .
Can video games be art? Maybe, but I think they are better than that. What? Yeah, video games are a creation that surpasses art in response, impact and usefulness. Games in general are a specialized form of play. Play is a crucial part of the learning process. It is something that is so fundamentally important that even animals do it instinctually -- as a matter of survival. Video games, as an offshoot of more classic games, can carry that vitality. That is not to say that everything learned in a game is important, or that every game has anything whatsoever to teach us. But the power of games to teach us and transform runs so far ahead of art that I cannot really understand the need to bring them down to that level.
I'm sure someone somewhere will make a game that is as interesting, evocative and useless as a great film or novel, but they would be better off making a game that is a great game.
Neocognitron | March 16, 2011 1:23 PM
"Nobody confuses mathematics with great art"? Excuse me? I think the admirers of Leonhard Euler, of whom there are quite a few, would fundamentally disagree on that point. Or did Mr. Moriarty really not notice that his example of the chessgame painting, his misdirection towards the tiny dog notwithstanding, perfectly adheres itself to the lines of the Golden Ratio?
And let's not forget to make a pointed reference to the obviously derogatory position of the "New Labor." Stay classy with your binary worldview and political-hipster style, Brian.
Kevin Williams | March 16, 2011 1:58 PM
Got my quotes hideously, horribly, horribly mixed up on my 11:02am post... long story...
I was actually looking for Brenda Laurel quoting Marshall McLuhan in "Computers as Theatre"... quote is actually a lot more
appropriate to any point I could've made about each videogame title being the studio rather than the sculpture:
"Anything that raises the environment to high intensity (…) turns the environment into an object of attention. When it
becomes an object of attention, it assumes the character of an antienvironment or an art object"...
Still fits well with garry's mod... whenever the emergent properties of a mediated environment are in and of themselves
about focus... BAM! spontaneous generation of art objects... generation of art objecfts is what happens when something
turns up that we perceive as distinctly "not the environment", and we interact with it because it's "not the
environment"... the byproduct of that reaction is art objects...
garry's mod or S.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow of Chernobyl loaded to the gills with early beta-release fan mods that teeter awkwardly
all piled up ontop one another...
Verily, Dwarf Fortress is "Waiting for Godot" as hypertheatre... art object after art object after art object everytime
someone plays a freshly generated world... or even when someone reads (quietly contemplates the sublime) a short story
which emerges from a Dwarf Fortress play session... anybody up to turning "Bravemule" into a theatre?
Videogames are, by definition, 'perfect' post-structuralist texts... close examination of some videogames would make Roland
Barthes' day... when you take away the author, you don't loose condition-art, all you do is cease to make condition-art the
main thrust and it becomes an incidental, complementary aspect of what's going on... so videogames are not about making
art, but they create plenty of it as a byproduct of their continued usage...
Pedro Neves | March 16, 2011 2:29 PM
This argument keeps coming up year after year, and after being a big believer in "games as art", I've come to think about things a little differently.
The problem with video games is that they are interactive. No other art form is. Well, on some level they ALL are. Art, to me, exists in the context of what the artist intends and what baggage the viewer/reader brings to it. In other words, art is communication. To communicate you not only have to send your message but you have to anticipate how it will be received by the listener. Art is great art when it's "universal" - when it's message survives through time and cultural changes - in other words, through many fluctuations of "baggage".
Ebert's core problem with games is that they are open-ended and interactive. His assumption is that no artist can communicate a complex message when they can't control how the game is experienced. It's my belief that artists never have total control, since art exists only upon consumption, and only through the filter of all that cultural baggage that people bring to it. What games do is shift "exchange point" of art from an identifiable object (a painting, a song, a book) to an undetermined array of possiblilities (every permutation of experience). It makes the experience of interactive art nearly impossible to compare in the way Ebert is accustomed.
Mozart once wrote an algorithm for creating melodies. What would Ebert consider that? Is the algorithm art or are any of the works produced by the algorithm art or is it all just a game? The melodies sound like Mozart melodies, too. What does that make it?
I think video games can never be art in the way that Ebert wants to define art. But I imagine that they will one day provide experiences better than the experience of art.
To me, the best example to a non-gamer shouldn't be a game like Braid or Portal, which riff on the expectations of gamers. I'd make Ebert read this review: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/04/10/butchering-pathologic-part-1-the-body/
Pathologic is a game that isn't fun, almost nobody played it, and after reading this review you probably won't want to play it either, but it's hard to ignore its artistic merit. Art is generally a cerebral form of communication - games like this allow art to happen on a more visceral, experiential level. That's where I think the future lies.
Jim | March 16, 2011 2:40 PM
Jim, I agree with you on your general statement about art being inherently interactive, but I just wanted to point out that:
"The problem with video games is that they are interactive. No other art form is. "
is inaccurate. There are many interactive forms of art
Performance art, Interactive Installation, Interactive Plays, Fluxus, as well as many conceptual works that are not performance based (Sol Lewitt for one), just to name a few genres.
For example, just recently Marina Abramovic had a very well received retrospective at the NY Moma, the centerpiece of which was her sitting at a table for hours each day and inviting visitors to come sit across from her and stare into her eyes. The 'art' part of that work was not her, she was no object. The art part was the interaction.
Zach Gage | March 16, 2011 3:22 PM
Re: other forms of interactive art, check out some of the awesome work featured in The Art of Participation, a fantastic exhibit of interactive work (all made between 1950-2009) featured at the SF MOMA: http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/306
Although, the history of participatory/interactive art goes way back before 1950, 'cause there's Dada and Futurism, and lots of other good stuff...
Sarah | March 16, 2011 5:09 PM
I note that nobody here has even mentioned the death of the author. There is a very strong tradition in literary criticism circles - and if literature is not art, what is? - to dissociate the authorial intention from the nature of the work. Ebert's argument implicitly rejects this notion, and in doing so places itself at odds with a great number of serious literary scholars, for whom it holds no water whatsoever.
Even if we accept the notion of authorial intent, the best art always invites a dialogue between the artist and the patron or viewer. The Mona Lisa is considered great art because her smile is enigmatic; it invites interpretation and speculation on the part of the viewer. No work can be art if it is shown only to monkeys or automata; even in this interpretation, art forms in the liminal space between the artist and audience - a space which is richer in games than in any other medium.
tl;dr: everyone is criticizing Ebert for knowing too little about games, but the real problem is that he knows too little about art.
5p. | March 16, 2011 8:12 PM
Is there a hive of gamers who swarm onto anyone that dares to question whether video games are art? (Because you've whacked the nest, if so.)
Yes, most works of fiction are not art. Narrative, Plot, and the rest of it are, in the vast majority of cases, not enough to give a work the status of art. When J. Random Gamer is making choices that affect Narrative or Plot, how does that affect the chances that the game is art? (Answer: Not for the better.)
What if J. Random Gamer makes narrative choices that make the gameplay artistic, while U. Arbitrary Player makes choices that are inartistic? Is the game then art for J. Random, but not for U. Arbitrary? If it appears differently to two different gamers, how can it draw them together? What common ground can it illuminate?
This takes us back to the idea of public versus private values. One of the requirements of art is that it engage public values, even if only to criticize them. If the final experience of a work is dependent on the choices that the viewer (or the gamer) makes, then it is ultimately dependent on private values.
In a state of smiling repose, I await your replies. (Hmm ... sounds elitist.)
(Tired retread of Norris K. Smith. Thank you, professor.)
g stephens | March 16, 2011 8:49 PM
Hey! Interesting points!
I'm really intrigued by the connections you're making between narrative, plot, and games. First, I'm curious about what you'd think about games that aren't narrative or plot-based, but rather, games that are more relational and experiential (and I'm not just talking about digital games, Kaprow's Happenings strike me as a pertinent example here). Some games are different every time they're played!
Second, I'm also quite interested in how subjectivity figures into your conception of art. Do you think that when something is "real art," that everyone who's exposed to the work has some sort of uniformity in their reaction? I would argue that the variations in interpretation, attributed to our own individual relationships to language, experience, aesthetics, etc. result in an infinite amount of interpretive permutations, and that that's AWESOME.
I think your idea of public versus private values is scary. Could you please elaborate on what that means? Do these values vary from nation to nation? State to state? Do they speak to one common experience that everyone's encountered? How can you verify that?
Additionally, I'd argue that there is no "final experience" of an artwork. We take our experiences of art out of the gallery, and they definitely change over time. And I might even go to far to suggest that sometimes, the value of an artists' game might not even prioritize player choices as the one single variable on which the success of a piece is defined by.
I'd love it if you could link to the Smith text you're alluding to, all of the work I've found of his was related to medieval art and architecture!
Sarah | March 16, 2011 11:03 PM
This is such a hard wide ranging subject to discuss, and decide upon simply because it's not a subject that has a black and white answer, even for those artworks that have been around for thousands of years. I guess you could define something as art if an arbitrary percentage of people who have "experienced" it, call it art right? Anyway, some comments I write down while reading your great argument, and following responses. (sorry if I go a bit all over the place and you tl;dr)
@Mike: Here here! I really agree that it's a problem that there's no real public way to enjoy "game as art", in the way that we use to come to consensus. No game concert hall, no game museum. And there's good reason for that. It's more personal. The fact that control is part of a game generally means that we can't just ramp up the experience to more people by making the screen bigger, or moving the line faster or even adding more seats and better acoustics. We get more bums on seats by distributing the "art". And hence the forum for discussion of this art is quite different than we've had before.
As pointed out art normally has to be viewed in context, social and period context normally. And that is not just for the understanding of what the art is saying, but also a lot of the time to appreciate its aesthetics. A lot of art is enjoyed, or enjoyed "fully", by those who have been taught to enjoy it, understand it, put themselves in a place where they can understand it. I think for a lot of games that may be able to be viewed as art (in some way) we have the problem that "periods" in games move very quickly. A game may give you a very strong feeling of art ie Deus Ex and Max Payne (as given examples) but it can be very hard to convince others of this fact as by the time it comes to talk about them they can just seem old, outdated etc and that is all you see. You also come across the problem that they have to experience the "art" for themselves, and this can be a lengthy process, and one that you need to "learn" (just as you do with other art).
Even trying to find a context for games that are specifically for or against an event, a movement or an idea may be very hard as the time of context can be very small for games. This may be said for a lot of media created in the digital age, and having to understand a micro-community to then understand an artwork is just plain near impossible!
Why can't people start asking, "Can art be expressed as a game?" If you can answer this, which I think is easily answered as "yes", then you've got your answer, logically. Art is about intent, and a dialogue between artist and art-experiencer, and so the best artist will decide what they want to express and THEN choose a media.
As @Pedro Neves points out "A videogame is not an 'art object"; it's an 'art environment'... what we take away from them is art...". It's the experience that is art. And the same could be argued for a game such as Go. It's the experience you get while playing, if you have learned to do it well, the experience that lets you learn more about the world than you would expect from a peiec of wood an some rocks. If Duchamp has put a Go board in a gallery I'm sure people would not have taken notice, as they'd, if they'd experienced the game, already have gotten from Go what it has to give them. Placing a urinal in a gallery gives different context to something that they would not have experienced in that way before, hence being able to become art to them.
The idea of flow in games I do not think is a good one, simply losing oneself in a game is not tantamount to opening oneself to new expression from it. I can get "flow" from playing a game of Quake (yes, it's simple, I can simply exist there) but am unlikely to get a life changing experience from it. And not all artwork has to put you in that space to have a dialogie either. A lot of art jolts you out of a reverie you may be in instead.
In games flow is participation. Not just seeing, haering or touching. It's all of these, but has the added ability to really play with control and lack thereof. I'm sure there's art that plays with this too, but I don't know if it does it as well as a lot of games (that aren't even trying to do it) do.
Some of the movies that Ebert talks about as being great (I'm guessing these are ones he puts up as art) are Superman, Metropolis and Lost in Translation. I do like this quite from him, "Metropolis does what many great films do, creating a time, place and characters so striking that they become part of our arsenal of images for imagining the world." And I think that many great games have done this too. I know a lot have just borrowed worlds and ideas, but some have really created unique and wonderous experiences that we carry with us (Mario anyone - laughable but true).
The last peice of art that I saw, that really put me in a state of "flow", that let me contemplate my navel while being entranced was "ATOMIC: FULL OF LOVE, FULL OF WONDER" by Nike Savvas (http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/images/galleries/SAVVAS_AtomicFullOfLove/004.jpg). It's simply a whole lot of coloured balls strung up from fishing wire. And you know what it made me feel? It made me go back to a way I felt while play around with a "star simulator" (not 'really' a game, but close in most ways, just no objectives) years before. And that feelnig was of sublime art: "Sublime art is the still evocation of the inexpressible."
And some random direct arguements ...
* You say "trying to define 'art' is like trying to define 'experience.'", but isn't that what games are? An experience!
* You say that artists are likely to be the ones to "pwn" Ebert. But can't we define "a" game as art, and then those people who made it ARE artists?
* Games can be hard to see as contemplative, partly because while we're engaged in them they take our, well, engagement. The fact you can sit and look at a painting and contemplate is partly due to the fact that you're not engaged by it. You're simply seeing it. But once you step back from a game you can more easily start contemplation.
If a game can reflect my life, "a series of interesting choices" I think it's doing pretty dam well!
Tarwin | March 17, 2011 1:13 AM
@5p -- "I note that nobody here has even mentioned the death of the author."
Well, I did sorta try and tie that one to the whole angle on the videogame not being so much the sculpture but more the sculptor's studio, and the gamer is the uncut marble, and the byproduct of their interactions can be (universally relevant, far reaching) art...
"Videogames are, by definition, 'perfect' post-structuralist texts... close examination of some videogames would make Roland Barthes' day... when you take away the author, you don't loose condition-art, all you do is cease to make condition-art the main thrust and it becomes an incidental, complementary aspect of what's going on"
@gstephens, I would chance the example of something like Dwarf Fortress, and how it consistently produces experiences that are, *compelling in the exact same way* throughout thousands of players...even across different versions and GUI's -- some people play Dwarf Fortress in abstract ASCII rendered in open GL, others in sprite-based isometric perspective -- they all take away similarly wry, surreal explorations of the human condition...
Moving aside from that one for a moment, one argument from Mr. Moriarty that was evaluated in point 22 of Zach Gage's reading of "an apology of Ebert" (videogames' hunger for Christopher Alexander-like pattern languages might be a symptom of the "as technically-intensive-as-architecture situation...)
-- "we are at a distinct disadvantage. The tools and technology we work with are (...) slippery. (...) How can a potential artist hope to accumulate any deep practice in this maelstrom (of videogame technology as informing design and consumption). How can we create in such an atmosphere?!?"
Good candidate for a baseline, common-ground tool might be the Source Engine... it allowed for works such as:
Robert Briscoe's "Dear Esther";
or
Robert Yang's "Radiator";
Look! These objects have proper people's names next to them... creative responsability... becoming of art, yes?
Another strong candidate for providing the stability a medium requires to be "taken for granted enough" to be able to yield art, as it were, is Unity... does it seem far-fecthed? A future where Unity is ubiquitous enough, and familiar enough that it is "fixed" enough to be a canvas, to be commented on (and commented from)...
back on the objects themselves...how about many of Brendan Chung's outings?..
or
Cavanagh, Byrne, and Morgan-Jones' "American Dream"...
[http://ded.increpare.com/~locus/american_dream/]
or...
Space Funeral! [http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/rpg/space-funeral/3492/] might very well take that whole "Suppose I design a platformer with backgrounds by Michelangelo, black and white characters from Ingmar Bergman movies, pop-up quotations from Shakespeare and music from The Well-Tempered Clavier" and ACTUALLY GETS IT RIGHT FOR A NET RESULT OF... art?
Pedro Neves | March 17, 2011 3:43 AM
I tell my students, games are art (though not Art)--but the players don't care.
I'm interested in the question, "why do video game makers care so strongly whether they're making art?" Or maybe, why is there a "hive of gamers who swarm onto anyone that dares to question whether video games are art?"
I think many must feel somehow "wrong" that they're making entertainment (or kitsch, if you will), that somehow this isn't an appropriate way to spend your life. They want to know that they're making something more "worthy". Hence the religion that games are (or will be) Art.
I also suspect that it's the frustrated story-tellers, who are often involved in video games, who argue about whether games are art. Some people try to use games as narrative, even though games have serious limitations/flaws (the lack of authorial control Ebert mentioned). Using games as a medium for narrative is like using Excel to write a novel, you can do it, but you've made it much more awkward for you (and possibly for your "consumer").
Tabletop game designers never worry about this art question. Maybe that's because tabletop games, until the advent of RPGs, were rarely narrative-driven. Or maybe because they're comfortable making "mere" entertainment.
Lewis Pulsipher | March 17, 2011 7:48 AM
@Lewis Pulsipher
I suspect that my post was waaaaay to long to be read, so i'll copy and paste a part here:
- - - -
3. "Why are some people in this industry so anxious to wrap themselves in the mantle of great art?"
We're not. Sublime art isn't a genre, it's not a medium. It's an impact. Great art is to say that a work is astonishing, you even define it yourself later: "Sublime art is the still evocation of the inexpressible."
How could we not strive to be that?
To not aspire to this is to undermine the medium, ANY medium.
- - - -
And it's not all game designers who want this, some just want to make entertainment.
But for those of us who want to make art, who understand these worlds we build can be art (and are art), why do you strive so hard to take this away from us?
Zach Gage | March 17, 2011 9:17 AM
@g stephens
Part of the art is defining the bounds. Play in a game takes place within these bounds, and they are there to control or not control the depth of choice and experience for the player. If the game wishes for no choice whatsoever, that is also a possibility within the spectrum.
I always wonder why it is that detractors claim any kind of choice takes away authorial intent, even though that choice is entirely within an authored environment. Its likely I'm missing something.
If two players derive vastly different meanings that could be good or bad, depending on the context of the artwork.
Not to mention, this is the same way that all other forms of art work. Have you never not understood or misunderstood a great work of art? If not, have you not witnessed someone not understanding one?
Zach Gage | March 17, 2011 9:22 AM
I read this article and thought about how the game Thief2 moved me and took me so deep into it's world that it is still one of the most captivating worlds I've been exposed to in modern media. I have a list of every game I've beaten in the last 10 to 12 years and Thief2 is #1 (I think maybe one of the Baldur's Gates is next). Then hours later, incredibly, I saw this.
http://www.gamersmint.com/thief-the-dark-project-retrospective
It's recalling the first game, which I never played, and I'm not sure the article goes into good detail, but it does express how strongly the game's creativity captured the gamer's imagination. That's art. ...the whimsy and emotion and aesthetic appreciation born out of creativity and usually promting it as well. Chess lacks such things. It doesn't seem that complicated to me.
selection7 | March 17, 2011 9:29 AM
Oh man, there are so many good ideas going on here!
One thing that I might want to make clearer is that I don't really skip around town, picking up random objects saying, "You're art! And you're art, and you're art!" (Although if that was your deal, I wouldn't fault you for it.).
But one thing I do think is really important, is that if someone comes up to me and says, "Look, I have made an art," or "I think (insert object/phenomenon/idea) is art," I have no place whatsoever to deny that. Even though talking about art is my business/day job/what puts the ramen on the table, it's never appropriate for me to deny the meaning/intention associated with another's perception of art.
As a curator/educator/historian, I can, however, criticize the heck out of something, or not include it in whatever exhibition or textbook I'm working on. But to overtly declare that something is not, or can never be art is just culturally irresponsible. Because really, what do we lose when we allow new things to be classified as art? Does it take us further away from god or nature? Does it mess up the economy? What are we actually losing?
And inre: the conversation about authorial intent, YES, the artist's intentions definitely count! And YES, the public's perception/reception definitely counts! These factors will never be separate from each other, and lately I've been thinking that these two elements can actually result in a co-authorship of knowledge/experience/insight. Maybe that co-authorship is sometimes boring, maybe it's sometimes excellent! Let's figure it out! Together! Yes!
Sarah | March 17, 2011 10:28 AM
I think part of the problem here is that—since in most good game design the artistic process is hidden through many, many stages of iteration and polishing—there's a vast gulf between the amount of control the average game designer feels like they're exerting, and the amount of control the average game player feels like they're having exerted upon them. If they're enjoying the game, the player is so enthralled with the vast possibility space that's been created that they simply can't imagine the meta-possibility space that the game designer has just spent the last year wrestling with.
Zach's own game Halcyon would probably make a good case study of this—there's a lot of room for the player to play around and interact in, but the possibility space of that room, I'm sure, was determined by a thousand tweaks of a thousand numbers, the changing of any of which would have made Zach feel like he wasn't "saying" what he was trying to "say."
This in fact might not be a bad rough metric for craft, or at least a certain kind of self-effacing craft—not just in games, but in explaining what's compelling about, say, an Altman or Coen movie, or a Mondrian or Kandinsky painting, or a Kafka or Crumb short story—they seem inevitable in a certain way, and open to interpretation even though it's clear their author has a very, very specific vision they're trying to communicate.
Jesse Fuchs | March 17, 2011 10:42 AM
I would like to remind Mr. Moriarty that cave paintings can't be compared to a Picasso or Renoir, and that just as he refers to games as an "industry", so too was art during the Renaissance, where painters and sculptors were on par with carpenters and gardeners and blacksmiths, and art was produced largely on commission, and usually for a patron or regular employer (such as the church).
Just as it took man thousands of years to evolve painting and literature and music to evolve to the point where there were any recognizable greats or classics or masters, so too will it take more than a mere 40 years of trying before anyone creates a work that is comparable.
Also, do not forget that while the authors' tools of the trade remain largely unchanged (except perhaps for the language they write in), and the theories and instruments of music, while they evolve, retain their foundations and instruments rarely become "obsolete", and this I feel this comparison to be even more unfair for an art form truly in its infancy. If only Kubrick and Clarke had been a little younger, can you imagine the potential of those two minds setting out to write and direct a cinematic video-game?
It's not the art form, it's just the times, and the people. One day when the tech is more stable and developed to the point where nearly anyone can do it - if only badly, just as anyone can write poetry - then I suspect we'll begin to see more genius shine through more often.
Siege | March 17, 2011 10:54 AM
I know that some people have made a similar version of this argument, but I want to make it as simple as possible: The argument that interactivity prevents art from being art is 100% poppycock.
Charles Dickens wrote two endings to Great Expectations. If we accept, for the moment, that Great Expectations is big-a Art, and then allow for the choosing of the ending to be done by the reader and not the editor. Is it still not Great Expectations, the great work of big-a Art?
Right now, as a reader, you have a choice to read either version. Inductively and recursively, it should stand that even more choices should be allowed.
I'd like to see Ebert argue that Marina Abramović's interactive performances aren't Art. I'd like to see Ebert argue that Marco Evaristti's goldfish in a blender is not Art.
Sure, I'd throw all that away to keep Shakespeare, Raphael and Duchamp's urinal. But that's just a matter of hierarchy, is it not?
gloomy | March 17, 2011 11:21 AM
In total, an interesting editorial, but one it seems to me to be devoted to slowly defining any possibility of a game being art out of existence.
Sorry, if you want to define art, and say what would be required for a game to be art, and then hold to that premise when people describe how various composers and painters defy that definition (Which they certainly do - sorry, be the exact same commercial pressures you say prevent games from being more than kitsch apply across every artistic venue. Michelangelo and Bach made sure they were paid too. Indeed, not being executed by your 'benefactor' might in some circles be considered an even more constraining factor.), then I might be willing to grant the defensibility of your position.
Instead you (and Ebert) start not with what art is, but by constraints of 'not art' - never actually checking them against 'known art' but exclusively against games, hiding behind the cloak of expertise whenever they might be challenged.
You even go so far as to say no Philosopher has ever labeled a game as art? Sorry - but that's simply factually incorrect (unless you intend to constrain that there be no overlap between chessplayers and Philosophers) even a minimal consideration of looking for a counterexample to your assumption would have told you you were simply wrong on the facts - there are "Great Games", there is cultural influence, there is insight and emotion and evolution of thought as deep as the insight of music or poetry.
And that lack of consideration for the "How would I be proven to be wrong" possibility is what undermines Ebert, not as an insightful expert in his field but as a man gathering evidence to support his opinion, and ignoring any that would undermine it.
And that makes this apologia not a defense of a debating position, but a defense of an irrational rant.
Jonnan
Jonnan | March 17, 2011 11:56 AM
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Passage here (http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage/).
Although I wouldn't say it is a great "game", I would argue that it is capital-a Art, at least for the arguments put forth here.
It forces you to reflect about your life, about the inevitability of death. And each time you play it you'll get something more or different out if it. Again, I wouldn't argue that it's a good game - but with the given definition I don't think it could be argued that it's not "sublime".
Tarwin | March 18, 2011 2:04 PM
TL;DR
accipeter | March 20, 2011 9:34 PM
I think Ian Bogost deftly dispelled this entire conversation in his article "Persuasive games: the proceduralist style" (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3909/persuasive_games_the_.php) - as he puts it, "Forget games -- "art" doesn't have any sort of stable meaning in contemporary culture anyway."
Contemporary artists use games and game ideas to create art, understood in the institutional context as practice within an art-discourse. That's a fact: whether it is good, bad, done well, done poorly, a waste of time, or an important trend is a matter of interpretation.
Affixing the "art" tag on essentially commercial projects is either a bid for a higher rate of return on one's cultural capital, or a marketing strategy, depending on the direction of the maneuver.
This conversation has long ago been transcended by Bogost, John Sharp and others. Rehashing it is the equivalent of arguing about how many angels can dance on the top of a joystick.
BTW, your citing of Hegel bypasses the fact that painting did not have the authority you ascribe to it until the end of the 19th century. Kant was talking mostly about landscapes: his discussion of human arts was limited at best. Hegel's aesthetics were not about eternal categories, but as signs of the development of the world spirit - and he identified poetry, sculpture and architecture as the significant forms. If John Sharp (et al's) idea of an emerging ludic age is correct, then perhaps we as speculative-dialectical practitioners of some sort, we can imagine an aesthetic of the rule-set that will be as obvious to future generations as that of the moving image is to us; of course, the category of "art" will be very likely all the less stable by then: "its" usefulness as a family of secular-sacral and national-subject-creating discourses is getting very old and jittery...
William Huber | March 20, 2011 10:01 PM
Oh, for clarity: when I say Kant was talking about landscapes, I don't mean landscape painting, either: he was talking about the human experience of natural landscapes.
William Huber | March 20, 2011 10:09 PM
There's a play by Maria Irene Fornes called "Fefu and Her Friends," from the 1970s, that's now an acknowledged classic; it's supposed to be staged in several rooms. The audience is split into two, or three groups, and each group chooses a different order of rooms to walk through. Although each person sees all the scenes, the order--which the audience has chosen--affects the meaning of the play, and the journey. Likewise, David Hancock's 1995 Obie-award-winning play "Race of the Ark Tattoo" has scenes or monologues that play out in an order chosen by the audience, not the playwright. Rupert Holmes' musical "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" and Ayn Rand's play "The Night of January 16th" both have different endings depending on how the audience votes at a certain point. This suggests, at the very least, that one can indeed have an element of choice and still have something be a work of art. (Regardless of what one thinks of Rand's politics, "The Night of January 16th" is a well-written piece--it's her least political and, not coincidentally, her strongest work.)
And, found on google, Jason Shiga's well-reviewed graphic novel "Meanwhile" is constructed as a choose-your-own-adventure.
http://blogs.laweekly.com/stylecouncil/2010/04/jason_shiga_meanwhile.php
Now, of course, these works (with the exception of Shiga's) are not *defined* by *constant* choice; there is significantly *less* interaction than a video game, but there is indeed choice.
If one accepts Fornes' work as a major American play--and the vast majority of critics do--and if one accepts Holmes' musical as a work of art--and there's no reason not to--then we're now in a realm in which works of art have audience choice as to how they end. Very limited. Doesn't happen very often. But still.
So. Is there a game with an equally limited choice matrix? Preferably one with complex themes, moral ambiguity, amazing visuals, and a thoughtful, meditative tone?
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Robyn and Rand Miller's "Myst," and their superb follow-up, "Riven."
In "Myst," you can choose the order in which you play, but, like Holmes' musical or Rand's play, there are only four possible endings. Both games have a narrative complexity and a theme of man's reach exceeding his grasp that would put most films to shame.
We really need to get Ebert to play Myst.
Greg | March 20, 2011 10:49 PM
Greg, trying to sell games to Ebert based on essentially non-ludic categories of experience (e.g., the twee-surreal landscape, or the melodrama of other games) is a losing proposition from the outset. He doesn't have a receptor - at least, not one cued to make aesthetic evaluations - for experiences which are essentially gamic. Games as games are better understood as architectural, kinetic-sculptural, or terpsichorean artifacts. They are the foundations of activities, and when they "represent" the world, they do so as activities. The gamers who profer the same old tired games with twee aesthetics or melodramatic narratives as "proof" that games are art betray their own tone-deafness regarding what makes games fantastic: their nature as rule-sets. Because if you continue to use the aesthetic criteria appropriate to non-game forms to evaluate games, they really will always come up wanting, and thus never be appreciated for the sort of greatness to which you aspire.
Some things games do well: organize attention in interesting ways; play with frustration; investigate multiple spatio-temporalities; and create provisional structures for human relationships. It really is in multiplayer (explored more by ARG and big game designers, but still..) that the possibility of an aesthetics of human inter-relation can be explored. Even in a team sport, there is an aesthetic experience in the inter-reliance of team members that many experimental and improvisational theater dramaturges would give their eye teeth for: yet we don't really have a rich vocabulary for those kind of experiences.
William Huber | March 20, 2011 11:26 PM
This was a good essay. The strongest argument I thought was that art is an expression in and for itself, and so while games might be expressive, they are directly focused on the players accomplishing the tasks set out for them by the game designers not an attempt to express some deeper truth. But then I thought about the movie War Games with Matthew Broderick and how the game tic-tac-toe was used to express a very deep truth about war and what it means to win. Perhaps, Ebert would claim the movie was the art, but it seems to me that the game tic-tac-toe was used expressively to deliver a sublime truth that went beyond players, choices, rules, and goals. So I am left thinking that perhaps there is a place for video games in great art.
Seth | March 20, 2011 11:38 PM
Moriarty's argument is puffed-up tripe. When you're discussing contemporary games, it's nearly impossible to isolate what the core of the thing is: the art, the music, the narrative, the mechanics, all working together?
And then what's all this crap about games existing to make money? This is true of all art forms, and to the extent it isn't, it isn't true of games -- which is to say there ARE indie developers who don't have any profit motive whatsoever.
Finally, though, it's absurd to argue about what is or isn't art because art is a vague word which people define a thousand different ways, much like love or god. It's asinine to say something is or isn't art. Be more precise: does something make you cry? Does it engage you intellectually? Does it challenge social norms? And so on.
Finally, in how many ways is Chess comparable to Batman: Arkham Asylum, or ring around the rosy, or snooker? Like "art," "game" covers such a vast array of endeavors I wonder why Moriarty thinks he can write a short essay claiming what "game" can or cannot be.
superflat | March 21, 2011 12:03 AM
"If Chess and Go, arguably the two greatest games in history, have never been regarded as works of art, why should Missile Command?"
hmmm ...
"Beauty in chess is closer to beauty in poetry; the chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts, and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. Actually, I believe that every chess player experiences a mixture of two aesthetic pleasures: first, the abstract image akin to the poetic idea of writing; secondly, the sensuous pleasure of the ideographic execution of that image on the chessboard. From my close contact with artists and chess players, I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists." -- Marcel Duchamp, August 30, 1952 address to the New York State Chess Association
andrew | March 21, 2011 4:18 AM
Games can become art, to the extent that they become a new medium for storytelling. Those of you who remember Myst and Marathon will probably also remember that uncovering the story was a big part of the fun of those games, entirely aside from the act of playing the game itself. The artist's challenge there is crafting a story within which the player can participate, but still conveys they point or points that the author wants to get across. That no one has successfully taken up that challenge yet does not mean that it cannot be done.
Tim McGaha | March 21, 2011 6:31 AM
I suppose my question is, what if you separate aspects of the game from the notion of it being a game? After all, there are games where the experience of play and the completion of the narrative are more important than the solving of puzzles or collecting of points. That's incidental.
Also, all Broadway musicals are kitsch? I take offense to that, good sir! The Broadway musical is one of America's only true art forms.
Joe G | March 21, 2011 2:47 PM
This lecture demonstrates an extremely weak sense of art history: modernist while disliking modern art, treating the Greco-Renaissance tradition as normative, referring to that tradition's aesthetic philosophy to make sense of the expanded field of art today.
Condemning camp while praising Oscar Wilde is one indication of its absurdity. Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp", 1964, which did more than anything to validate camp intellectually, was dedicated to Oscar Wilde.
Pace Wilde, art has served utilitarian functions throughout history, mostly propagandistic ones (this covers artists as considerable as Michelangelo, Rubens, and David). Likewise, it appeals to aristocratic vanity, from Van Dyke (who corrupted English art by making his aristocratic sitters look too good; in turn aristocratic portraiture became the dominant genre, visible in the Northcote Chess Players) to the present trustees of the Museum of Modern Art, NY.
These may be base purposes, but it
was Moriarty who described sublime art as "Art that's good for you." Do you know that a usurer commissioned Giotto's great chapel in Padua? The art was good for him, since it was supposed to get him out of purgatory, where he was surely heading.
The bizarre thing about this post is that it re-hatches a modernist narrative (of the development of kitschy pseudo-art in the French Salons in the mid-19th century, of ubiquitous kitsch v. fragile sublimity, etc.) while demonstrating no taste for modern art.
I'd call Northcote's Chess Players kitsch, although nowhere nearly so kitschy as this sentence: "And the golden boy is Art itself, silently watching us, pointing at a secret he longs to share." Clearly a lot of people like this kind of painting, but I think their taste is suspect.
Moriarty surely thinks the same of me, as I like Duchamp, though I worry about his "art's" implications. (Duchamp himself expressed interest in making "works that are not works of art.") He first gained note as a Cubist c. 1911, but by 1913 invented "readymades", common objects displaced from their utilitarian context into an artistic one. "Fountain", which is what he called the Urinal flipped on its side, was shown in a jury-less exhibition in New York in 1917. Duchamp was on the board of the exhibition committee--hence his decision to sign the piece "R. Mutt." The exhibition's organizers considered the work beyond the pale, and threw it away. Duchamp was trying to provoke the sort of philistine reaction Moriarty gives him. The only surviving document of the original "work" is the photograph in this post, by Alfred Stieglitz, widely considered one of the greatest formal photographers in history. Is the photo art?
Duchamp had relatively little influence on artists until the 1960s, when artists began to re-evaluate him through the lens of Jasper Johns. The first monograph appeared, I think, in 1959, the first exhibition in 1963. Since then his work has been extremely influential on contemporary artists, for better or worse. (I tend to think for worse, that the balance between sensuous appeal and conceptual interest has been upset in favor of the later.) He lays claim to the invention of conceptual art and installation art (which can be wonderfully sensuous), although no birth is immaculate.
After 1923, Duchamp gave up his cerebral, games-playing art for chess!
Given the expansive definition of art necessary to account for the diverse, stunningly radical art of the 20th century, it seems to me that much historical aesthetics are, if not obsolete, then of limited application.
As for video-games, I had this argument with some friends recently, including a recent Yale grad who was a sculpture major. I hate video games, convinced that I wasted too much of my youth on them, but they were convinced that games like Zelda offer the same kind of wonder and fascination that art does. I'm still skeptical, but if people enjoy these involved narrative fantasies in a way that isn't mind-numbing, I think it's deeply silly to refer to so much philosophy to argue for a strict semantic definition.
The best thing about modern art: it ruins these definitions. Duchamp will win...
Robert G. | March 21, 2011 7:43 PM
excellent! probably the best thing i've read yet on games=!art
hs | March 22, 2011 5:09 PM
This is fantastic, spot on.
I'm a twenty two year-old classical pianist and English student, well-versed by mentors and parents in the arts; music, literature, film, etc, and it would never occur to me to categorize video games as art. Although creative processes go into a video game and are to be honored as valuable manifestations of the human mind, and any given game music composer or graphic designer may be considered an artist (the first thing I notice about a game is the music), a game is not art. We play games to take part in worlds that are defined for us, that are tangible; you know that there is going to be a checkpoint, you know that you will be given the information you need to move to the next stage. There are twenty stones you need to collect, and when you do, you win. They are in a sense anti-life, in that you can rely on them. And it's wholly comforting to escape to that world, especially when it is a masterfully designed one. But it is certainly not an elevation experience--one that says, "This is life. This is what you have to deal with. But look at it from this angle and you may get by, you may see some beauty in it; it might morph into something new." It is purely an escape. Sometimes a marvelous one, sometimes an 8-bit adrenaline rush.
I play games when I am depressed. I cannot read Nabokov or listen to Mahler's 6th when I am in that kind of slump--they force me to face reality, they force me to come face to face with regret, the unending disappointment of living in an indifferent universe as a finite species, anguish, emptiness, coldness, hate, futility, absurdity; but when I am ready for those and much more (beauty, love, mystery, confusion, awe, passion, nature, empathy, warmth), I toss aside the games and bask in the things created by hands that wanted to take me somewhere.
K
Kamila | March 23, 2011 4:57 AM
Then you are obviously playing the wrong games.
Jesse Fuchs | March 24, 2011 10:48 PM
Then you are obviously playing the wrong games.
Jesse Fuchs | March 24, 2011 10:48 PM
Chess might not be art, but, playing chess is.
Alex | March 27, 2011 1:40 AM
Learn to paragraph properly... Automatically pressing the enter key every other sentence does not qualify.
Gorgol | March 27, 2011 5:38 AM
This whole argument seems to be based on a classic Kantian mistake: namely, that if pleasure isn't completely personal, it must be completely universal. This is absurd. The fact that you and I can share an experience does not mean that everyone everywhere can share the same experience.
Taste is not a faculty for recognizing sublime, universal beauty. Taste is a culturally constructed mechanism for placing objects into a hierarchy--for demonstrating pseudo-objectively that we, the educated elite, are better and smarter than the rabble. It's an idle semantic game at best, and a locus of rank snobbery at worst.
Art-with-a-capital-A is a moving target. There is, in fact, no hard kernel that makes art Art. It's contextual, and it's an ongoing process. That was the point that Duchamp was making with his readymades: "Art is a game between all people of all periods," not some kind of two-way radio to the realm of Platonic forms.
If you actually think that "the still evocation of the inexpressible" (your definition of sublime art) is something we can all agree on, then frankly, you're kidding yourself.
I know that I've experienced art moments (for lack of a better term) while playing video games, and that I have profitably reflected on those moments afterward. But that's just the thing: It's personal. Your mileage may vary.
Drew | March 27, 2011 9:16 AM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O2Rq4HJBxw&feature=player_detailpage#t=2258s
I thought this Harvard lecture on measuring "pleasures" was relevant. Specifically the Shakespeare vs. Simpsons bit.
Are great game players performance artists?
Watching Michael Jordan (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4jBKlL66Lg) and Daigo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7cW2nMf1gk) "playing" their respective games is a performance in itself as their mastery over their respective games are to the level of being "artists."
But is it comparable to watching a performance of Hamlet and will people still remember it and re-enact it 500 years from now?
Relevant | March 27, 2011 10:31 AM
Hey guys!
I cried moar when Aerith died in Final Fantasy than when Bogart said "Here's looking at you, kid" to that one chick at the end of Citizen Kane.
Suck on dat Ebert. LOL
LOLatEbert | March 27, 2011 11:03 AM
"But can an arrangement of mechanics and affordances, rules and goals, itself constitute a work of art?
Before you scream "Yes," explain to me why Chess is not regarded as a work of art."
Sorry, this is wrong.
Chess is not a work of art because the mechanics of chess are not used to convey anything.
I hate moral dilemmas in video games (at least, such as they are now). But if a developer says to you "kill this person, or don't" and then killing the subject has a bad result and allowing the subject to live has a positive result, than the developer has said something with as much authorial control as anyone who writes a film or a novel, and the word "game" not longer applies.
The argument you made doesn't work for the same reason that "if my boring, every day life isn't art, then film isn't either" doesn't fly.
Although the writer of this apology seems rather uneducated both on the subjects of the game industry and the literature he claims to have studied in school.
I put it to you that Half-Life 2 was more moving than Children of Men, Legend of Zelda meant just as much to me as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (and Jackson's awful film adaptation, I suppose), and Braid was far more meaningful (and far less pretentious) than Eraserhead. If these things aren't true for you, it's because you didn't understand the pieces, and the way in which interactivity was the driving force behind the themes. That's your fault, and that's Ebert's fault.
Ocarina of Time- despite awful, childish, and translated dialog, managed to make make me feel 18. It made me feel like a child leaving home and entering the big, bad, world, through the power of mechanics. Something as simple as "Saria's house has healing hearts, I can go there to be safe. I don't know where hearts are in the world, and now I have to learn" is just as powerful as the ending of American Graffiti (and, is more meaningful than all the bad attempts at "art games" made by hacks like you).
Also, you're making the assumption that industry and art are mutually exclusive. Which, considering we're mostly dealing with western, primarily capitalist nations here, means you're stupid.
This is poorly organized, so I'll end on a note that probably could have been better fitted somewhere else in this comment.
A lot of the points you made were good, apart from all the wrong ones, problem being that they were irrelevant. Yes, loading a game up with brilliant orchestral scores and images based on classical art does not contribute to games as an art form. You tried it, and that's because you're a bad game developer.
Video games are their own art form because of the way they exploit their own strengths to make us feel something- sometimes with the help of strengths from other mediums (You're lying to yourself if you've told yourself this isn't true for other mediums)
The end.
Brandon Castro | March 27, 2011 12:43 PM
"Video games are an industry. You are attending a giant industry conference. Industries make products."
Deluded suit thinks he knows what he is talking about.
Just because you work for your salary+benefits, some of us do it for the love.
fistfull | March 27, 2011 8:07 PM
This article was a disappointment for me. It raises a good number of valid points, only to allow them to subside into what I suspect most people with an aptitude for philosophical thought would consider to be a rather uncertain jumble. The notion of a belles-lettristic critical tradition in gaming circles clearly has a long way to go before reaching maturity. Barthes it certainly isn't.
That said, it's worth raising a point that doesn't seem to have been addressed directly in these comments regarding the very simple politics of the aesthetic theory described here: the whole problem with the division between great art versus kitsch lies in two words, 'sez you'. If great art is the direct expression of 'authorial' intent, who gets to say who is an author and who isn't, and which of his or her works are genuine expressions of it? Most writing that deals with an author in this way implies that great authors simply arise in nature (or similar) but, since this explanation fails to address the always thorny problem of epistemic access, this doesn't cut it. So the authority to decide who's an author and who isn't devolves upon the person writing, as in (for example) T. S. Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent, a situation which I find to be ethically repugnant.
The problem is that as with most discussions between reasonable and intelligent people, the dissention in the 'are games art' debate lies in the fact that both sides usually mean very different things by 'games' and 'art', a point which this article really should have spent more time exploring instead of settling on Schopenhauer's version of aesthetic theory as being basically fine. I don't think it is, and I doubt that many other people are particularly attracted by its implications for the nature of art either.
Silence of the Clams | March 28, 2011 11:25 AM
One word for anyone who doesn't think games can be art: QWOP. And having gone through Dr. Foddy's research papers, I can assured doubters that this game (and his new game, GIRP) is the expression of a deep, brilliant, and subtle worldview. Writes much better than Moriarity, too.
Jesse Fuchs | March 30, 2011 7:13 AM
The big problem with any attempt to define art is that to any definition, there are a million exceptions that disprove it.
Walk into any modern art museum and I think it becomes clear we can't define art. Jut to tackle one of the main criteria Moriarty and Ebert lean on, which is to define art as something to do with interactivity vs noninteractivity - Who can't think of games that are entirely linear, or works of art that are very interactive?
Ultimately it's too abstract and personal a concept to be able to define exactly. The role of the audience is too important. A splash of paint on a museum wall can evoke in one person the same thoughts, feelings, and interpretation that an undeniable grand work could in someone else.
We'd all be better off if there was no such word as "Art". We should instead discuss whether something is meaningful, important, culturally significant, emotional, whether it makes the viewer think, how it changes their life, what it teaches them.
The whole "art" label is a disaster, and in modern times especially, nothing but a massive scam industry.
Can I name any/many games that affected me in the same kinds of ways that literature masterpieces, stunning paintings, tear-inducingly beautiful sculptures have? Not many, almost none. What does that mean? Not much - just that game makers in the 20-30 year history are perhaps less often motivated to aim for these goals than 2000+ years of writers, sculptors, etc.
Ultimately, games are just a medium. You can not say anything about the artistic merits (or lack thereof) of games just as you can't of paper, canvas, or stone.
This is where Moriarty's reasoning fails. You can create Pong, you can create Modern Warfare, or you can create Heavy Rain. Or you could create a game so undeniably profound, beautiful, and meaningful that we'd all stop bickering about this whole issue overnight.
All in all, everything is art and nothing is art. A streak of piss on the sidewalk can be meaningful, and a painting in a museum can be just blobs of color on a piece of cloth.
The only question that matters, the only question we should be asking, is: is it GOOD or BAD?
tentacle | April 25, 2011 7:23 AM