Should Video Games be Legitimated as Art?

This article is just the beginning of a series on the aesthetics and cultural significance of video games. Stay tuned for Thursday as I continue to explore the difficult question of video games as art.

Flower. Art? Or the pernicious excess of our wasteful dilletante culture? You decide.

Video games occupy a rare and incredible position in culture. They are a relatively new medium that is just beginning to attain a level of almost universal saturation. They are also being made by people with highly developed artistic sensibilities, raising powerful and important questions about their relationship to art. In the recent TEDx talk at USC, Kellee Santiago defends the thesis that video games are art. She does this, perhaps somewhat weakly, by employing an easy Wikipedia definition that states:

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

It’s pretty clear why Santiago bases her discussion on this definition. It’s general enough to encompass most things. To its discredit, it is also so general as to encompass just about everything resulting from human intention and design. A few unfortunate examples spring readily to mind: advertising, police crowd control, war, propaganda, hate literature, and religious proselytizing. I, for one, desire none of these, and would be loathe to call any of them ‘art’. Yet they all arrange elements (words, images, people) to affect senses and or emotions (with pain, fear, violence, bigotry, sex; to inspire hate, anger, lust, consumption, etc…).

My objections, of course, would probably stem from an inclination to be a purist aesthete, and delimit art specifically to that domain of things that doesn’t offend or adversely affect my senses and emotions. I can’t in all fairness expect art to pander specifically to my tastes and ideology. That’s fine, I don’t want it to. I am prepared to accept that art can be offensive and brutal, grating and intolerable. Sometimes it can even be used for profit (I say this sarcastically, because in truth most artists deserve to make a living, and therefore art should, in an idealistic world, be capable of supporting its creators).

Flow. How will future generations judge the merits of games like this?

At the heart of this issue is the question of legitimacy. We are a culture deeply imbued with dichotomies of incredible excess and self-critical guilt. We engage in frivolous activities the like and extent of which no civilization in history has been able to parallel. To paint a certain picture of excess, consider a friend of mine who lives below what statisticians of wealth would call “the poverty level”, and what the most affluent might describe as “abject destitution.” He, by living frugally in subsidized housing, nevertheless can own a computer (second hand), has access to the internet, running water, clothing, food, privacy, all the books he could ever want to read, and one of the best health care systems in the world. His living situation, while not as luxurious as a Czar or the Pope, profoundly surpasses the comforts and resources available to most of the world’s inhabitants (both past and present).

Now my intention here is not to moralize, but to point out a problematic tendency in the ways our culture engages with art and its other, so-called frivolities. I mention my friend’s situation to define a frame of reference for the statistical majority of people living in the affluent West. Even the poorest among us can find shelter, clothing, food and drink, and health care services. How many people in the world can claim the same? We are a minority.

Now, far from denying the vast disparity that separates the rich from the poor in the developed world, I want to examine precisely the privileges that this difference entails. I am undeniably extremely fortunate to have had access to a liberal arts education in philosophy and literature. I can think of virtually no other formal education that is more detached from the work of necessity and the hard toil of life. Now I work part time and can afford to play video games and write articles about such; my situation is undeniably privileged, even among people in my own country. In ancient Israel, I would probably have been a Pharisee, with all the detachment and snobbery that implies.

Braid

So when I, and others in a similar position, opine about video games as art, we are engaging in a distinctly Western practice of legitimating a part of our experience, of assuaging our inherited guilt. Art has already undergone the battle of self-justification in our culture. The culture wars of the 60s and 70s, the punk movement, Andy Warhol: all these were events in the progression of art from a peripheral or elitist activity to a central, defining facet of our civilization. The popularization of something must, almost by definition, bring with it the aura of legitimacy.

Video games already glow with the de facto approval of big business. They are lucrative, and thus trump modesty and objections of opulence by dint of the almighty dollar. But is this enough? People like Santiago (and the writers of Little Bo Beep), by describing video games as art, are attempting to bring them into the same purview of legitimate activity that is enjoyed by film, literature, and all other more conventional (read: established) forms of artistic creation. And as they well should be! It is my explicit position, and I will fight strongly to defend it, that video games are art; that said, it is also my opinion that we, as gamers but also as the beneficiaries of tremendous over-arching privilege, must be clear about what games signify, why we play them, and in what capacity their being art affects our relationship to them and to the activity of ‘frivolous’ play.