Can Video Games be Art? A Response to Roger Ebert

After eleven years of anticipation, yours and mine surely, Blizzard Entertainment finally released, at the end of last month, Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. I recall many a moon glued to my computer screen as a young teen, listening to Tupac on the radio and building small colonies on extraterrestrial planets — fighting out epic digital wars with friends and enemies, sometimes both. I mastered playing all of the three races but claimed the Protoss, a foreign race of humanoid creatures genetically equipped with strange psionic powers (really, a sort of advanced magical technology) as my own. The game was well structured, and meticulously balanced. It became highly competitive among master players and even professionally competitive, particularly in South Korea, where experts still play out tense, and sometimes elegant games on national television. But one question lingers concerning these video games. And we can thank film critic Roger Ebert for lighting the fire under the conversation. Can video games be art?

Mr. Ebert blogged much the same  in 2005 and set the Internet ablaze: video games can never be art. He repeated the offense this past April, although to his later chagrin, in response to a TED talk at USC by Kellee Santiago, a designer and producer of video games. There’s over 4,000 comments, few of which I’ve been able to read. But I did watch the TED talk and can say I was fully disappointed. Ms. Santiago’s presentation on why video games are, in fact, already art is hardly convincing. She orients her whole argument around an impoverished and far too broad definition of art, which she scrounged from a Wikipedia entry (and the very beginning of that entry):

Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions.

Such a definition would allow art to entail such entities as sport, dinner, perhaps even a conversation, or a math problem. I’m not much of a fan for such bloated definitions; concepts lose their meaningfulness, sensible force, and practical usefulness as a result. We have to wage wars for the sake of words.

Ms. Santiago’s presentation is not much inspiration for Mr. Ebert; his response is equally short-sighted and unconvincing. Why can video games never be art? Or as Mr. Ebert qualified, why can video games never be art in our lifetime? He seems to point to only one clear distinction between these two concepts:

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

I give Mr. Ebert credit for trying to define two of the most difficult and slippery concepts in our language. But the stakes are high. The German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously pointed out how difficult it is to provide the sufficient and necessary conditions of the notion of “game.” He spirals us down that complexity in the 66th aphorism of The Philosophical Investigations:

Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games”. I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? — Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’ “-but look and see whether there is anything common to all. — For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look! –

Even when we cannot strictly define a word, we know its meaning in how we use the word; we know practically the role it plays in our language. Let’s follow Wittgenstein’s suggestion and take a look: I can think of many games that we play on a daily basis, which do not fall under Mr. Ebert’s requirement that they can be won or lost. The simplest is a game of catch. All those college students playing Frisbee. A bit more abstract, how about a game of cat and mouse? Or the many games of flirtation.

In the world of video games, the MMORPG (massive, multi-online, role-playing games) defies the win-lose game definition. In such a game, a user develops an avatar (just like the film) inside a dynamic virtual world shared among thousands of other players. The world is a real-time external digital world; when we log out, it still exists and changes, sustained by the many users still playing it, much like the Internet as a whole.

What one chooses to do with an avatar is open, narratively and structurally; there is no predetermined way to win the game. A player of the hugely popular MMO Everquest may choose to focus on the occupation of a blacksmith. Another player of World of Warcraft may prefer questing. Many take villainous routes and become thieves or murderers. In all these ways, there is no end to the craft, nor to the game. And there are many ways to play the game; it doesn’t lose its gameness – reduced to the field of pure experience, or the virtual representation of a story. The game is still played.

Perhaps Mr. Ebert would have fared better to question whether art can be played?

But does that even fly? Don’t we need to understand some of the most abstract and important films, say Alain Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad, by playing them?

What is at stake in this conversation is whether a video game — formally distinguished primarily by its open and interactive narrative structure — can amount to art. Whereas a work of art, at least conventionally understood, is closed — its aesthetic form and style determined and completed — video games are open; the user determines the narrative development under the guidelines of a loose structure and set of rules. We appreciate film or paintings as voyeurs, viewing from a safe distance, and fully removed from the inner workings of the art. In contrast we play video games as the controller of an avatar, immersed in the game’s inner workings, fully implied in the movements of the protagonist.

The French director and critic Jean-Luc Godard famously said that films need a beginning, middle, and end — just not necessarily in that order. Video games have much the same, but it’s up to the user, not the director, how to fit together that narrative arc.

Such an interactive narrative structure is what makes video games so interesting, and it is also what makes them problematic. Mr. Ebert’s tangential argument is that no video game thus far resembles the great dramatists, directors, composers, and writers of the modern era; there are no Prousts or Hemingways, no Hitchcocks nor Kubricks. And I wonder, could there ever be? Does the open structural nature at the heart of a video game establish the conditions of possibility for such a great work of art?

Random still from Blizzard's World of Warcraft MMO

One writer, Tom Bissell, has stood out in this debate. A fiction writer and admirer, even obsessor, of video games, Mr. Bissell wrote extensively on his personal experiences with video games in a recently published book of essays and memoirs Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. In a particularly memorable account of his playing Grand Theft Auto IV, Mr. Bissell confesses an addiction with both cocaine and the game, which seem to go hand in hand. He sympathizes with the main protagonist of GTA IV, Niko, a Serbian immigrant who suffered through the Balkan Wars and has found himself in the strange and violent world of a virtual reproduction of New York City. As players of the game, we embody Niko like a poltergeist:

In GTA IV, Niko is charged with disposing of the bodies of two men whose deaths Niko is partially responsible for. You/Niko drive across Liberty City with these bodies in the trunk to a corrupt physician who plans to sell the organs on the black market. Here the horror of the situation is refracted in an entirely different manner, which allows the understanding that GTA IV is an engine of a far more intimate process of implication. While on his foul errand, Niko must cope with lifelike traffic, police harassment, red lights, pedestrians, and a poorly handling loan car. Literally thousands of in-game variables complicate what you are trying to do. . . . The GTA IV mission is a procedural event in which one’s moral perception of the (admittedly much sillier) situation is scrambled by myriad other distractions. It turns narrative into an active experience, which film is simply unable to do in the same way. And it is moments like this that remind me why I love video games and what they give me that nothing else can.

You can read more of that chapter, and much more about the cocaine addiction, in the Guardian here.

As a fiction author, Mr. Bissell has a certain privileged access into the narrative components of the video game — both why it matters and why it’s indeed stuck in a fairly inchoate and childish stage of development. But things seem to be getting better. Starcraft II has already received substantial praise for its sophisticated story and character development — not typically the well crafted points of any video game. Still, it’s hard to imagine that one would grow spiritually by engaging with Starcraft like one might by reading Dostoevsky or watching Space Odyssey.

What’s undoubtedly exciting is that we’re witnessing the emergence of a new narrative structure and aesthetic experience, one that has both captivated millions worldwide (not to mention for a number of years grossed more than the Hollywood film industry), whether or not the notion of art can make room for it.