The Art of Assumption

2009-01-05

Last year, on the Gamasutra podcast (presented by Tom Kim), Iain Simons declared that it was "just obvious" that games are interesting.

He asserted what others have intimated - that we don't need to justify the statement that "games are art." His comment seemed to be part of a wider argument that we don't need to justify calling games art, interesting, or worthy of study. For the sake of the podcast, that was fine. Simons has done a lot for the public profile of games (at least in the UK), and he and Kim were hardly recording a podcast to discuss whether or not games were art. They could assume, for the sake of their conversation, that games were all of these things.

But the conversation has ended now, and we no longer have that luxury. We have to justify what we're doing here, even if it seems obvious to us. You can't just call the game an art form and hope to get away with it.

So when Roger Ebert claims that games aren't high art, we shouldn't react negatively. We should think about what that means. When he made the now-famous claim, months ago, bloggers rolled their eyes and angry gamers flamed. This was the wrong response for a number of reasons. Firstly, that's not how we do things around here. Secondly, he had a point. From his own blog:

Anything can be art. Even a can of Campbell's soup. What I should have said is that games could not be high art, as I understand it.

The term "high art" may engender elitism, but I feel that - at least, as I define it - it is elitism of a linguistic nature and not a broader one. The concept, I suggest, is a valid one, even if the wording of its name embodies snobbery. (NB: high art, by my definition, is not the same as high culture. I would probably condemn the idea of there being a "high culture.")

High art, as I understand it, is art (art here being "a created thing") which exists for no purpose other than the immediate; the aesthetic. That is, high art is invention without utility. Can we say that games have no purpose? Compare the game to the painting. The painting exists for its own sake more obviously than the game does. After all, games, by their nature, have utility. By the very fact of their involving interactive mechanics, they necessitate internal utility. Externally, we're already talking about what games can teach us, or where they can take us, or what they can do for us: they could teach us about a past war or civilization, simulate flying a plane, or even - somehow - visualise the development of a scientific theory. What do paintings do for us? Some of them look nice, but that's rarely the purpose for the best paintings. It is in the nature of paintings to be; their utility as an ornament is usually peripheral. Games have obvious utilities. These utilities can be just as expressive and educational as anything else, but they are not representative of a medium which can call itself fine art. (Both of these media, by the way, are open to the criticism my father makes when he claims that games are not art: that they are designed for a very explicit purpose, and that that is to make money.)

I want to clarify my position, a little. I do disagree with what I understand Ebert to be saying when he asks,

If you can go through "every emotional journey available," doesn't that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices.

Perhaps Ebert means to say that art forms may only express themselves along a linear plane. If he does, then I feel that he might have the makings of a coherent argument which excluded games from being considered high art. As it stands, he seems to be claiming that nothing which is open to different interpretations can be called art. I really hope that he's not claiming that, because Roger Ebert is very articulate, and a pre-eminent film critic. I would hate him to be a madman.

He writes:

I might suggest that gamers have a prejudiced view of their medium, and particularly what it can be. Games may not be Shakespeare quite yet, but I have the prejudice that they never will be, and some gamers are prejudiced that they will.

If we take "prejudiced" to mean "subjective," then I wouldn't want to put myself in the camp which claims that games cannot be Shakespeare. I'm not really sure what to do with that particular phrase, but I wouldn't want to say that games aren't worthy of study, or that they aren't moving. My purpose in starting this blog in September was to attempt to study games, and to explain why I found them moving. At the same time, though, I'm not sure that we can responsibly call them high art.

A lot of the trouble here stems from our definition of high art. Ebert has this to say:

Many experiences that move me in some way or another are not art. A year ago I lost the ability (temporarily, I hope) to speak. I was deeply moved by the experience. It was not art.

High art is not "what moves us." Even art does not mean that. I think that we've proven that games can move us, and Shakespeare's work has moved a few hearts by now, but that does not make either of these things art.

I'm not so sure that this matters. When I first declared that I planned to write this post, Michael Abbott responded, asking why we'd want games to be high art anyway. Would it make us play our games any differently, or make us enjoy them any more? No. Would it make them less worthy of study? Of course not. So what does it matter? It's like arguing over whether pineapple is a fruit. (It's not.) We might be interested in the answer, but it shouldn't keep us up at night. When, as I brushed my teeth one morning, I came up with the idea for this post, I didn't think "and that'll be my last post, because if games aren't high art, then why write about them?"

Furthermore, "high art," as many of my Twitleagues appear to have noted, is a problematic term. No-one seems to be able to agree on what it means. In order to avoid the vagaries my blog has been accused of in the past, I have given it a definition I could refer back to. Perhaps this strikes you as artificial, but I had no choice. In any case, my definition of "high art" is certainly different from Roger Ebert's. Make of that what you will.

What's important to note is that being art isn't the same thing as being worthy of study, or relevant. I can't agree with Chris Hyde when he comments that "if games aren't high art or don't aim for that, then I'm spending a lot of time on something with a low return on investment." Why should games have to be high art for us to enjoy them? N

Comments are closed. Selected responses to this article are archived below.

Christopher Hyde
I didn't say that games couldn't be enjoyed if they weren't high art.

I want games to shoot for that rarefied air. For an art form that demands as much of one's time as this one does not to get to that point would be a great disappointment.

If all games want to be is an entertaining diversion, that's fine. I've no objection to that. I'll be a little sad that they couldn't get there, but I'm sure the world'll keep spinning.

Roger Travis
This seems like a fine way to put Ebert's silliness to bed. Certainly it's a defensible definition for "high art," although you seem by it to have captured the subset of great works that I tend to consider, well, onanistic.

Justin Keverne
I might be reading you wrong, and I do feel I'm forming a habit of taking a contrary position, but by your definition, neither literature not film could validly be called "high art." Both have an internal utility, that of being read or being watched.

Using your definition I can think of nothing that exists only for the immediate; the aesthetic. Even a painting posses the core utility of communicating an idea. In order for it not to, it would have to consist merely of shapes and colours on canvas. Only then would it have no utility and qualify as "high art," but that's a concept I can't see many people supporting.

If you'll indulge me,

Jahhfuahdadfa

is "high art" it serves no purpose beyond itself. Somehow I don't really think that works.

I question Christopher's stance because I don't believe that the ability to evoke emotional reactions in a great novel or film is what qualifies it as "high art." That ability is merely part of the inherent ability of those media to entertain; video games have already shown themselves capable of this. I have no doubt that games will evoke the same responses and sensations as other great works. We just haven't mastered the medium yet.

I'm comfortable calling games an entertainment medium. Successfully and consistently providing engaging and emotive entertainment to another person is one of the most powerful creative endeavours.

Nels Anderson
No thing is crafted without a purpose. When a painting is made, its author creates with intent, even if that intent is simply to create something beautiful. But the notion of beauty is so fantastically subjective that in intending to create something beautiful, the artist says something about their notion of beauty. Art without intent would be random noise. I don't think even Jackson Pollock would say his art was simply noise.

Forget "high art." We should worry about what is and isn't "art." Of course, "art" is also hugely subjective. Something being "art" just means it's interesting.

Sparky Clarkson
I can't get behind this view at all. You're attempting to use this definition to assess a medium, an end for which it is ill-suited. It's not difficult to come up with a whole list of famous paintings that would not be high art by your standard, even if we left out those which were created for their external utility (e.g. by the artist who paints to eat). Because your definition is bound in the intent of the author towards particular works you are obligated to examine them individually, not as a medium.

You attempt to get around that by claiming that games necessarily have utility, but I don't feel that this is obvious. What exactly is the utility of Katamari Damacy, or Final Fantasy VII? They are designed and do things internally, but sculptures, paintings, novels, plays, poems, and symphonies are also designed, often with great subtlety and care. Some symphonies actually rely on the interaction between the listener and a specific disposition of the orchestra. There is a more general problem that almost everything has some kind of "internal utility." Perhaps there are a few scattered pieces that fit your definition (paintings not meant to be looked at?), but could we identify them without an extensive psychoanalysis of the creator at the moment of creation?

Film, drama, novels, and epic poetry were all tawdry entertainments at one time or another, and in those eras it was unthinkable that they should be considered art. It was not the clever categorizations of dedicated aestheticians that decided the issue. So I roll my eyes when Roger Ebert says games are not art, and when Clint Hocking says they are. Not because these men are fools, but because the debate is irrelevant. They may as well argue over whether games are glumsnorgle. At least the effort to keep a straight face during the point/counterpoint might provide some entertainment. The most compelling case that can be made for games as art is to assume that they are and turn that assumption into ideas which illuminate the games themselves. Show people that the viewpoint works and they'll come around to it.

SR
Add me to the list of voices looking to bury "high art," although I give you credit for trying to rehabilitate it by offering a new definition.

Strip away loaded terms like "art." Ebert is claiming that something happens to him, inside his head, when in the presence of a well-produced, well-performed work of Shakespeare. I don't believe he ever satisfactorily articulates what this thing is, but whatever it might be he's certain he's never going to get it from a game. Why? Because games are active, and all his other forms of art are enjoyed passively - that is to say, the art is passed in front of his sensory apparatus and all other "work" is done inside his head.

In contrast, games present little on their own. Their content emerges through the active participation of the recipient - pushing buttons, making choices, shaping (to some degree) the experience within the parameters laid out by the game's developers.

But even here, I think we can drop the loaded term "game." Ebert seems to be arguing that active participation and the experience of art cannot coexist. The dancer IN Swan Lake cannot appreciate the performance as art, only the audience can. Likewise for the drummer keeping time during the sax solo, or the actor on the set of the movie - until she eventually sits in an audience and passively watches herself.

Is this true? Can an active agent, a performer, be moved in the same way as a passive audience? Until the age of video games, it's not a problem too many people have had to concern themselves with; rich, multimedia interactive experiences were difficult or impossible to create and distribute until the computer age.

I feel that we are moving towards an ability for games to not only create the kind of experience Ebert gets from his films but to create new kinds of artistic expression that passive media cannot offer. I don't think we're there yet, but I've enjoyed all the various efforts that get us incrementally closer.

Charles
While I don't mean to join the dog pile, I would like to point out that your definition of art is something of an historical anomaly. The for the vast majority of history works of art filled very specific utilities. Sculpture and painting were meant to commemorate events of civic or religious significance, literature grew out of oral and written histories, and theater has always served a rhetorical role in public life.

'Art for art's sake' is a fairly new, historically speaking, idea. I don't think that you meant to make this argument, but the idea you're putting forward is basically that things like The Illiad, or the Sistine Chapel shouldn't be considered art either.

Alex Myers
As an artist I've had many, many similar discussions with other artists and non-artists alike in theory classes and in the pub. This whole high art vs. low art discussion started with the publication of Russell Lynes' essay Tastemakers in Harper's Magazine, June, 1947. Given the nature of the magazine and the nature of Lynes' other writings, it's safe to assume that the editorial was satirical. Lynes has said that reactions to his essay were "a nice demonstration of how self-conscious people are about their taste. Lynes has also said that after seeing the reactions of people to his essay the whole hierarchy is superfluous and could go either way.

"It appeared to me then that there was no reason why the lowbrows should be at the bottom of the chart and the highbrows at the top; it would have worked just as well the other way around."

Spencer, I applaud this kind of discussion. It should happen more often. But, I think the categories of high and low art are, as I've said, more esoteric than universal and should be used carefully.

Pala
Hi guys. I know its a bit pretentious and not immediately useful, but I'd to *assert* that given what I've read about the question of "the-definition-of-art" - defining Art is a game that won't leave anyone satisfied, (let along Fine Art).

A nice, easy to read, academic book is "Definitions of Art" by Stephen Davies.

However I'd like to add to this discussion is something I came across in "Philosophy of Art" by Noel Carroll, another nice/easy/academic read I'd recommend.

After going through the various approaches to defining art, Carroll suggests that while providing a Definition is a bit hard, perhaps one can offer a theory of Identification (i.e. how a particular artwork is identified as being art).

Historical narration (as proposed by Carroll) is a theory of art identification that recognizes the fact that the art-status of a work is often defended by referring to an acknowledged artwork and demonstrating the narrative by which the new work is a continuation of that tradition. The link from acknowledged to disputed [or non-decided] art occurs via contemporary art-regard .

[nb. Problems include explaining how art is accepted from a foreign culture (unless explaining that in those cases one resorts to functional analysis of those works, or at least their ancestral counterparts from which they derive).]

Another approach: if we consider Art (or Fine Art) to be some sort of precipitate of the narrative that is our lifeworld (culture, etc), maybe we should be less interested in defining Art (and then showing how games fit into that set), and more interested in showing how games form part of the story of our lifeworld's art narrative. Less defining, more identifying/characterising.