Video games as an art form

While many video games are recognized as art for their visual imagery and storytelling, another class of games has gained attention for creating an emotional experience for the player, generally by having the user role-play as a character under a stress-inducing situation, covering topics associated with poverty, sexuality, and physical and mental illnesses.[16][17] Such games are considered to be examples of an empathy game, loosely described by Patrick Begley of the Sydney Morning Herald as a game that "asks players to inhabit their character's emotional worlds".[18]

American courts first began examining the question of whether video games were entitled to constitutional guarantees of free speech as under the First Amendment in strings of cases starting around 1982 related to ordinances that limited minors from buying video games or from video game arcades, such as America's Best Family Showplace Corp. v. City of New York, Dept. of Bldgs.[19] Precedent began to be established for finding that video games were no more expressive than pinball, chess, board- or card-games, or organized sports, and thus could not be considered protected speech.[20] However, these early cases brought into question the potential that video games may be more advanced than just pinball machines due to the virtual worlds they could represent, and as technology advanced, could change the precedence.[20]

A series of cases at federal district and circuit courts starting in 2000 which challenged these ordinances and restrictions against video games as being "harmful to minors" began an alteration of precedent of the nature of expression of video games. In these cases, the courts identified two elements of video games; that they were expressive works that had the potential to be protected by the First Amendment, and that under review using Miller test, video games were not seen as obscene, and thus were not restricted from being protected works.[20][21] The Seventh Circuit case American Amusement Machine Ass'n v. Kendrick[22] in 2001 is considered to be the most definitive basis of the new precedent set by these cases, in which Judge Richard Posner recognized that obscenity, related to sexualized content, was separate from violent content, and unlike the Miller test to review obscene content, there was no similar prurient interest for which to exclude violent content as protected speech.[20][23] With this determination, video games were treated by these courts as protected works under the First Amendment, and generally ruled that ordinances blocking minors from playing or purchasing them were unconstitutional. However, these remained precedence for the districts or circuits and did not set nationwide standards.[20]

Violence in video games remained a concern for parents, advocates, and lawmakers, and even with the existence the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) to proving ratings on video games, laws were passed in various states to enforce these ratings, most designed to prevent sales of games rated "Mature" to minors by fining retailer. Video game industry trade groups sued to block these laws, generally succeeding based on similar precedence from the early 2000 cases that video games, even violent ones, were protected speech.[23]

In 2011's Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, which was based on a similar law in California to block the sales of mature video games to minors, the United States Supreme Court ruled that games are entitled to First Amendment protection, with the majority opinion reading, "Like the protected books, plays, and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player's interaction with the virtual world). That suffices to confer First Amendment protection."[24][23]

Emerging art forms depend upon existing communities for recognition and legitimation, even as they compete with those incumbents for ideological and material support.[1] Games have faced suspicion from critics of established media, just as film, television, and comics were once doubted.[1] Keith Stewart, games editor for The Guardian, sees mainstream media as preferring to approach games from the angle of the human stories surrounding them – making indie games with identifiable creators attractive to journalists.[25] Critical communities devoted to games have likewise embraced auteur theory of games' artistic potential as underpinned by the creative visions of sole creators.[1] John Lanchester of the London Review of Books noted that even as video games become a larger market by revenues compared to films and books, the amount of attention given to video games is generally delegated to a limited set of sources and do not readily enter the "cultural discourse".[26]

Auteur theory has led to some overlap between indie status and artistic cachet, with critics praising stylistic choices in indie games, when those same choices would be deplored in a commercial game.[27] Rather than defending the medium as a whole, proponents of art games attempt to create a separate milieu opposed to video games they accept to be low culture.[1][27] In practice, indie auteurs often receive commercial backing, while mainstream creators such as Shigeru Miyamoto and Peter Molyneux are increasingly viewed as auteurs as well.[1] The conflation of indieness and artistry has been criticized by some, including Anna Anthropy,[1] Lucy Kellaway,[27] and Jim Munroe,[28] who argue the characteristics that distinguish indie games from the mainstream are not inherently artistic.

Munroe suggested that video games often face a double standard in that if they conform to traditional notions of the game as a toy for children then they are flippantly dismissed as trivial and non-artistic, but if they push the envelope by introducing serious adult themes into games then they face negative criticism and controversy for failing to conform to the very standards of non-artistic triviality demanded by these traditional notions. He further explained games as a type of art more akin to architecture, in which the artist creates a space for the audience to experience on their own terms, than to a non-interactive presentation as in cinema.[28]

Video game designer Kim Swift believes games can be artistic but denies that they need to be art in order to have cultural value. She feels video games should aspire to be toys through which adults can exercise their imaginations.[29]

The question rose to wide public attention in the mid-2000s when film critic Roger Ebert participated in a series of controversial debates and published colloquies.[30] In 2005, following an online discussion concerning whether or not knowledge of the game Doom was essential to a proper appreciation of the film Doom (which Ebert had awarded one star) as a commentary on the game,[31] Ebert described video games as a non-artistic medium incomparable to the more established art forms:

To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

— Roger Ebert[32]

In 2006, Ebert took part in a panel discussion at the Conference on World Affairs entitled "An Epic Debate: Are Video Games an Art Form?" in which he stated that video games do not explore the meaning of being human as other art forms do.[33][34] A year later, in response to comments from Clive Barker on the panel discussion, Ebert further noted that video games present a malleability that would otherwise ruin other forms of art. As an example, Ebert posed the idea of a version of Romeo and Juliet that would allow for an optional happy ending. Such an option, according to Ebert, would weaken the artistic expression of the original work.[35] In April 2010, Ebert published an essay, dissecting a presentation made by Kellee Santiago of thatgamecompany at the 2009 Technology Entertainment Design Conference, where he again claimed that games can never be art, due to their rules and goal-based interactivity.[36]

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 [an] 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.

— Roger Ebert[36]

Ebert's essay was strongly criticized by the gaming community,[37][38][39] including Santiago herself, who believes that video games as artistic media are only at their infancy, similar to prehistoric cave paintings.[40] Ebert later amended his comments in 2010, conceding that games may indeed be art in a non-traditional sense, that he had enjoyed playing Cosmology of Kyoto, and addressing some replies to his original arguments.[41]

Although Ebert did not engage with the issue again and his view remains mired in controversy, the notion that video games are ineligible to be considered fine art due to their commercial appeal and structure as choice-driven narratives has proved persuasive for many including video game luminary Brian Moriarty who in March 2011 gave a lecture on the topic entitled An Apology For Roger Ebert. In this lecture Moriarty emphasized that video games are merely an extension of traditional rule-based games and that there has been no call to declare games like Chess and Go to be art. He went on to argue that art in the sense that Romantics like Ebert, Schopenhauer, and he were concerned with (i.e. fine art or sublime art) is exceptionally rare and that Ebert was being consistent by declaring video games to be without artistic merit inasmuch as Ebert had previously claimed that "hardly any movies are art."[31] Moriarty decried the modern expansion of the definition of art to include low art, comparing video games to kitsch and describing aesthetic appreciation of video games as camp. After addressing the corrupting influence of commercial forces in indie games and the difficulty of setting out to create art given the "slippery" tools that game designers must work with, Moriarty concluded that ultimately it was the fact that player choices were presented in games that structurally invalidated the application of the term "art" to video games as the audience's interaction with the work wrests control from the author and thereby negates the expression of art. This lecture was in turn criticized sharply by noted video game designer Zach Gage.[31]

In a 2006 interview with US Official PlayStation 2 Magazine, game designer Hideo Kojima agreed with Ebert's assessment that video games are not art. Kojima acknowledged that games may contain artwork, but he stressed the intrinsically popular nature of video games in contrast to the niche interests served by art. Since the highest ideal of all video games is to achieve 100% player satisfaction whereas art is targeted to at least one person, Kojima argued that video game creation is more of a service than an artistic endeavor.[42]

At the 2010 Art History of Games conference, Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey (founding members of indie studio Tale of Tales), argued in no uncertain terms that games "are not art" and that they are by and large "a waste of time." Central to Tale of Tales' distinction between games and art is the purposive nature of games as opposed to art: Whereas humans possess a biological need that is only satisfied by play, argues Samyn, and as play has manifested itself in the form of games, games represent nothing more than a physiological necessity. Art, on the other hand, is not created out of a physical need but rather it represents a search for higher purposes. Thus the fact that a game acts to fulfill the physical needs of the player is sufficient, according to Samyn, to disqualify it as art.[4]

Gamers were surprised by this controversial stance due to the frequency of prior third-party characterizations of Tale of Tales' productions as "art games," however Tale of Tales clarified that the games they were making simply expanded the conception of games. The characterization of their games as "art games," noted Samyn, was merely a byproduct of the imaginative stagnation and lack of progressivism in the video game industry. While Tale of Tales acknowledged that old media featuring one-way communication was not enough, and that two-way communication via computers offers the way forward for art, the studio argued that such communication today is being held hostage by the video game industry.[4] To enable and foment this futuristic two-way art, suggests Tale of Tales, the concept of "the game" must be eviscerated by games that do not fit within the current paradigm and then "life must be breathed into the carcass" through the creation of artworks Samyn and Harvey refer to as "not games."[4]

In 2011, Samyn further refined his argument that games are not art by emphasizing the fact that games are systematic and rule-based. Samyn identified an industry emphasis on gameplay mechanics as directly responsible for the marginalization of artistic narrative in games and he described modern video games as little more than digital sport. Pointing to systemic problems, Samyn criticized the current model whereby the putative artist must work through a large and highly efficient development team who may not share the artist's vision. However, Samyn does not reject the idea that games, as a medium, can be used to create art. To create art using the medium of the video game Samyn suggests that the artistic message must precede the means of its expression in the guidance of gameplay mechanics, the development of "funness" or economic considerations must cease to guide the work's creation, and the development process must embrace a model wherein a single artist-author's vision gains central primacy.[43]

In 2012, Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones published an article arguing that games are more like a playground and not art. Jones also notes that the nature of creating video games robs "one person’s reaction to life" and that "no one owns the game, so there is no artist, and therefore no work of art."[44]

In 2013, video game journalist Patricia Hernandez described a puzzle in the interactive fiction game Photopia. The solution of the puzzle involves a reveal regarding the player's controlled playable character, prompting experiences which Hernandez argues could not be made "as powerful as they are" in any other art form without interactivity. Hernandez says that narrations in the interactive medium happen in the first person and the present tense, which are "fundamental (and often misunderstood) elements of the interactive medium".[45]