The Art of Videogames
I haven’t posted anything in a long time, but the recent disagreement between Kellee Santiago and Roger Ebert on the topic of videogames as art has me thinking. And none of my normal chat partners are online.
Getting straight to the point, the problem seems to be that Ebert still thinks of games as an adversarial activity. When you play chess, you are playing against a person, same as pong. But very quickly videogames went somewhere completely different with the idea that you were playing against the game itself. Points and high score charts maintained the illusion of playing against other people for a while, but where are we now? When people talk about a game now, they don’t talk about beating it, or winning as Roger Ebert does in his article. They talk about play times, and story, and game mechanics. You don’t win a game, you finish it. If someone asked you what’s your high score on the latest Final Fantasy game or even the most bloodthirsty shooter, you’d think they were crazy.
The very lack of this ability to beat other people in games is what caused the development of achievements and gamer scores. The games weren’t enough of a game anymore. I don’t know if Ebert isn’t aware of these phenomena, or if he’s willfully ignoring it by taking the stance that games that have a strong story aren’t real games.
Now, I’d like to do something really strange and compare videogames to music. For most of history, music was something you had to do. You couldn’t just turn on a song and listen to it as the artist intended every time. People would buy sheet music and play it for themselves or with others. And it was art.
Music didn’t have to be performed for an audience, to be art. It was something people could have a personal experience with. Someone might enjoy just one section and play just that one part over and over, like playing one level of a game that you find more enjoyable. Someone might find it a challenge to play a particularly fast piece even faster. They might even challenge their friends, seeing who can play through it faster, I know Irish musicians do this with each other all the time, playing not just as quickly as possible, but quickly and well, just like an achievement system.
Writing a video game is like writing chamber music. You write it, get it published and printed, then other people get to have fun with it. It’s art to be performed by the consumer.