Good and evil.
Beauty and ugliness.
Art and entertainment.
Everything exists on a spectrum. Art is expression, and it finds expression through various media.
The videogame, however, is a medium that does not allow the expression needed for art. Videogames are a tool for play. They can be aesthetic, they can even hold some sort of philosophy, tell a narrative, and more, and yet they will never be art. You might be asking yourself if this argument - whether videogames are art - has been settled. It has not. The reason it is not is that the addicts who play them can’t accept that they are not art, and so the back and forth never ends. You wouldn’t believe a meth addict who says they need the drug to live.
Videogames can never be more than an amusement, and at worst they are a sick compulsion like pornography or gambling. Worse, videogames more and more rely on nostalgia which adds a sick tiredness to the medium. Designers ape flashing lights and Pavlovian measures from the deepest pits of Las Vegas in even the most humble-appearing of games, and you want to convince anyone that videogames are art? They are there to distract you, much as porn is. They can be for education, for play and even for awkward storytelling, but they can not be art.
After I voiced this fact on Twitter/X there were a number of generic responses that I will try to respond to here:
‘Oh but what about franchise I love/indie game no one has played?!’
This is entirely a biased response. The alcoholic or abuser who brushes off his addiction with some excuse or other, some plea that they are not really like this. Enjoyment or aesthetic value has no place in determining videogames as art. The fact that every game requires even the smallest of inputs relegates the entire category to competition. To push a button or steer an avatar is to compete against entropy, to compete against the system itself. All other media let the art through. The minute a videogame stops having competitive inputs or gameplay elements, it becomes art, but ceases to be a game.
‘But what about Twilight/Marvel movies/Lil Nas X? Bad art exists in other media, so you can’t say videogames are the only form of mere entertainment!’
You can point to all the entertaining/pornographic versions of other media but that tells us nothing. They are bad art, yes, but that does not negate the artistic potential of film, plays, music, opera, and so on. It would be like if someone said that a peloton or treadmill can never be considered a mode of transport. The purpose of transport is to get from A to B. Exercise equipment may have some features of transportation, and even provide a simulation of locomotion, but they are fundamentally incapable of taking you anywhere. The philistine points to a dodgem car and says, ‘These cars can’t take me anywhere, therefore cars are not transport either.’ Just because one can reduce a medium (car) to its basic entertaining components (dodgem) does not negate the mode of transport from the ability to take us from A to B.
Videogames are intrinsically incapable of the transcendence that is required of art.
‘Don’t you know the novel/radio/film/whatever was originally seen as pornographic too?!?’
Contrary to popular belief, these other media were never seen a pornographic in themselves. Pornography, of course, crept into these media, but their merits as art forms were never in doubt. The earliest reels of moving pictures are still taught in film class. Don Quixote was doing postmodernism before it was a thing. But we are human. If anything a medium degenerates towards pornography and entertainment. Videogames just happened to begin their reign that way. The more the technological system gets involved, the more the masses seek it out, the worse it gets. Consider the following from the book Painted People:
Sharkey had been tattooing for forty years and had come to ‘mourn the practical side of the art, whose memory lingers fondly over the days when tattooing was a thing of beauty and a joy forever’. ‘Times ain’t what they was,’ he told the reporter. He had made a lifetime specialty of tattooing exquisite Oriental designs - real works of art - on discerning clients. Now, as tattooing was to be ‘found beneath many a tailored shirt’, he was reduced to tattooing pictures of diving girls, Kewpie dolls, and Venus rising from the sea. ‘Now in my day,’ he sighed, ‘they wanted dragons.’
Consider that. In my day they wanted dragons. We used to battle dragons, now we are content to pretend. A videogame is a degeneration of the real. You carry out tasks, inhabit another life, but it adds nothing to the human spirit. Art is about drama that is realer than real. A videogame is a task.
Tattooing is clearly an art given the only thing that changes is the canvas. It is an ancient art form and like all art forms it was originally tied to religion. Religion and the spiritual were served by rituals, and rituals were served by art. As we have become secular so our artistic forms have devolved until we invented one that has no need to pretend it has ties to the divine at all.
‘DEFINE ART.’
The most common response to ‘videogames aren’t art’ is being asked to define ‘art’ or some related concept. The above conversation with this Autistocrates fellow, who completely misunderstands what a ritual is or what they are for, shows why ‘define art' is such a ridiculous argument. For one, the definition game can go on forever as you are asked to define words you have just used to define art. Second, as above, anything can be twisted to fit a definition. Simply frame the features of a thing (in this case ‘ritual’ but one replier also twisted both drugs and gambling to fit a given definition of art) so that they align with the definition your opponent has given. The inherent problem when defining art is that you are attempting to bring the non-rational into the realm of the rational, the comprehensible, and the logical. Both art and pornography can best be defined as ‘I know it when I see it’. Another response is opened up when you refuse to define art (because you shouldn’t have to) and that is the interlocuter states that ‘anything can be art.’ Apart from this being a misunderstanding of Duchamp, it is clearly not the case. Theory will not win over common sense. A car can never be art. Food can never be art. Some categories of object or craft serve other purposes. A car is for driving no matter how aesthetic it looks. Food is for eating and will turn to shit no matter how many elements you subtly combine. Simply put, the game of semantics is a haven for people defending the merits of videogames.
So, if art is to serve a ritual, then what of videogames? What do videogames serve? There is no higher calling that videogames can claim to serve.
David Mamet’s short tract Three Uses of the Knife doesn’t mention videogames once, but reading it today it feels remarkably pertinent. It is from 1998, before videogames were close to what they are now (i.e. pre-Half-life). In it Mamet discusses drama, tragedy and plays, but there is plenty of insight here because he focuses heavily on what non-art is.
The demand of immediate gratification is death for any art which takes place over time. That the audience be teased, disappointed, reassured, frightened, and finally freed is the essence of dramatic/musical form. It has to take place over time, and it must contain reversals. And the greater the art the more upsetting, provoking, “dramatic” those reversals are - it is only, and necessarily, garbage that “makes us feel good all the time.”
What provides instant gratification more than videogames? We know, for a fact (if you want to use reason and Science), that videogames produce a larger dopamine response than other media. Games are designed to produce flow. They want you to succeed. Oh, sure, you might have a ‘reversal’ as in Half-life 2 where you lose your weapons, but the enemies grow weaker in response. The flow continues apace. There is no halting the flow of gameplay and there is a distinct inevitability - the player always knows he will finish the game. There is no risk and therefore there is no dramatic tension. The player can simply hit ‘reload from last checkpoint.’
Interestingly, the artist or creator is the one who is meant to inhabit the flow state and that is what the original study on flow looked at. Today videogame designers set out to provide the player with that flow state, only the player never creates anything. They simply complete the game and move on to the next task. If they are not playing a game with infinite content, they are eagerly awaiting the next franchise installment/next big [insert genre] title. It. Never. Ends. Mamet again:
Artists don’t set out to bring anything to the audience or to anyone else. They set out, again, to cure a raging imbalance.
That imbalance is in themselves or in the wider world. They see a tilt of the scales and they simply must try to rectify it. On the other hand, videogames must bring win conditions, competition, puzzles to complete, more intricate narratives, more explosions, subtler tones, and so on and so on. They raise your dopamine tolerance. They do anything but try to bring balance.
The difference is as follows:
The first work is an meta-commentary on the creative process and film in general, which is often a hallmark of art as such (novels about writing, writers, and the creative process are endless). The other is a cheap gimmick designed to take your dollars. The people who made The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent set out to make art. They felt a disturbance related to Nicolas Cage’s place in the canon (See also: Community Season Five Episode Two) and attempted to balance it. (Note my use of the word attempt, that is important.) The Dead by Daylight creators thought of nothing other than money. Now, plenty of films just plonk celebrity cameos into the script for the same reason, but unlike film, videogames cannot employ a self-referential frame. The creators behind Kingdom Hearts or SuperSmash Bros can only every think about how to sell the next game in the franchise. Am I saying that The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is particularly good art? No, and you would be an ingrate to think so. But it is striving for that same sense of righting a wrong that great art sets out to achieve.
Videogames are so suited for the System that all other media try to emulate or otherwise ‘crossover’ with them. Videogames are the perfection of technological progress as a means of control and stupefaction. They do this by providing us with the illusion of control. They are a medium based on sympathy, not empathy. They are so popular because society has turned the great masses into petty narcissists like the Gods of the Pantheon.
Today, as in ancient Rome, when all avenues of success have been traveled and all prizes won, the final prize is the delusion of godhead.
David Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife
The difference between sympathy and empathy is best summed up as Zig Ziglar says it. Empathy is when you are on a rocking boat and a fellow passenger becomes nauseous. You have undergone a similar feeling before and so you attend to them with a bucket, a rub on the back, a warm cloth. Sympathy is watching someone throw up and feeling compelled to hurl chunks next to them (I’m paraphrasing Ziggy). A videogame is a sympathy machine. Art enables empathy. You tell the virgin not to go into the basement because that’s where the killer will be. In a game, the point is go down and be terrified.
True transcendence is simultaneous separation from the object and, at the same time, unfathomable union with it. I know I am dreaming—a knowledge which separates me from the events of the dream—while, at the same time, I am one with it.
A videogame is a paradox. You are both sympathetically one with the game world and avatar, and yet you are inhabiting something completely unreal. It purports to be like art and take you out of yourself, yet you fully inhabit the dream world. Other art is physical and yet you are separate from it. You are aware of its physical nature (a writer in a room, you on the bed; an artist in a studio, you in the Louvre) which is a displacement in time, yet in the moment it incorporates you. Art is a link between the subjective and the objective. Videogames steal your soul and place it in a cage. Dramatic tension is also nullified by the bizarre fact that it is replaced by fight or flight responses, so your mind is tricked into thinking it is dramatic, and yet there is no doubt that the story will go on because you can always go back to the last check point. There is never any need for suspension of disbelief. What other medium pauses itself by having the audience fail, or inserts non-medium elements into what the medium is. Videogames often rely on cutscenes to convey story, yet when does a film ever stop using the camera? How can such a deceiving, lying medium be art?
The condition of postmodern enlightenment arises instead from fusing the self with the system. Pain is not mastered, it is anaesthetised, impotence is not overcome, it is virtually liberated, social problems are not solved, they are evaporated into an abstract impossibility, the utopia of the five sided square.
In great art - the Bible, Shakespeare, Bach - the balance is long-lasting. It is not that great art reveals a great truth, but that is stills a conflict - by airing rather than rationalizing it.
David Mamet, Three Uses of the Knife
Art is about a human pain, also known as Truth. It hyper-contextualises reality so that the human observer can overcome this pain or truth, to square themselves with it as best as possible. A videogame is the postmodern medium because it anaesthetises the audience, even more than TV. The aim is to quite literally solve a problem, to win. You are fooled into thinking that you are really doing something. Utopia is no place, and videogames don’t exist.
To finish, here is a fun, hastily constructed scale of media:
Music = unprotected sex with an Italian model. Commercial pop music and the like is still fucking her when she’s a nonna.
Literature = having sex with your fat, dumpy wife of 40 years. Whether it is high or low brow is the difference between a university educated woman or poor wastrel.
Movies = paying for a prostitute, possible in the comfort of your own home or in a dark, smelly room. Anything from cheap and possibly diseased to a high-end whore.
Single player games = jerking it to lesbian porn your whole life
Multiplayer games = needing ever increasingly sick shit just to get off
I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans
I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create
William Blake, Jerusalem Chapter 1
A few links
I was inspired by this article from Darren Allen:
He is much more eloquent than I, but I think there is always more that could be said on the subject. The gamers will not rest.
Also, the following video is from a pair about my own age, perhaps a bit younger, but they provide some great food for thought on the topic.
"Imma let you finish... but I just want to say that Mario Kart was one of the best ART-WORKs of all time. Of ALL Time!" —Kanye West