ludi artis causa
Mar. 29th, 2011 10:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishBrian Moriarty: An Apology for Roger Ebert: "This is an apology in the sense of a Greek apologia, the systematic defense of a position or opinion.... No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a [video] game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers."
Moriarty1 goes on to provide definitive proof that video games are not and cannot be art, as he and Ebert define art.
He makes three main arguments. Two are in support of the idea that video games are not now art. First, video games are produced under huge commercial pressures and as such tend heavily towards being kitsch, not sublime art. (His exploration of "kitsch" is, incidentally, rather insightful.) These market pressures mean that the only people producing games that might be art are "the people who create art anyway." They haven't succeeded yet, in part because the medium is incredibly fragmented. There's been no real opportunity for anyone to fully master the creation of video games, not when tools change half a dozen times in a decade.
These are fair enough as far as they go, and not even all that controversial2. From my perspective there's a sharp divide between the "artistic" and "gameplay" portions of something like Shadow of the Colossus. It's a good game, and a game that Makes One Think, but the gameplay doesn't feel all that tied to the Thinking. Still, that doesn't mean that a closer marriage of the two is impossible.
That's where Moriarty's third point comes in and carries most of the weight. This, really, is his argument that video games cannot be art.
For Moriarty, "sublime art is the still evocation of the inexpressible." It's that word, "still," that's the source of all the trouble. In his view art is not something you the viewer participate in, it's something you contemplate. The minute you start making conscious choices you lose the capability to contemplate, to develop and to experience the transcendental insights that are the goal of art.
Rubbish.
The strong form of the hypothesis can be disposed of trivially. In 2006 I visited the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and spent some time in the modern art exhibitions, among them Thomas Hirschhorn's Cavemanman. Hirschhorn constructed a cave system out of cardboard, tape, and aluminum foil, with bits of detritus scattered throughout. You, the viewer, walk through it; you choose in what order you encounter the various pieces of the installation. Or take a less avant-garde example, say, looking at a painting. To some extent you're choosing what part of the picture to focus on. You're making choices that shape your experience. There is no way to experience a work of art without making decisions about how you experience it.
So what Moriarty is reduced to is the idea that the choices one makes in service of contemplating Art are qualitatively different from the choices one makes in playing a videogame.
Again, rubbish. Take Emily Short's Galatea, which she describes as "a single conversation with a single character, which can end any of a number of ways.... [it has] a large number of endings, some more satisfactory than others, of which many could be considered 'win' states." Galatea is a character study, qualitatively no different from, say, Citizen Kane. The main difference between the two is that Welles decreed an order for the viewer to uncover aspects of Kane's character, while in Galatea you're discovering them for yourself.
Welles's well-defined ordering can be part of the artistic experience, certainly. It's not a defining characteristic. Cavemanman dispenses with that notion quite handily.
"But Galatea's not a game!" the purists cry. I'd disagree, but it's a fair criticism. For a more "game-like" experience, there's Andrew Plotkin's Hunter, in Darkness. You have a goal: kill the beast. The exploration and puzzle-solving you do is almost entirely in service of that goal. Zarf's writing is wonderfully atmospheric; in at least one place I had to force myself to type the next command, to see what came next. And as the game progressed, I found my thoughts on the protagonist evolving. By the end I had to confront what "I" as the protagonist had done thus far, and what that said about "me" that I was willing to do those things.
It's no coincidence that my examples are drawn from interactive fiction. Zarf's current project aside, IF has none of the commercial pressures that drive art towards kitsch, and the broad strokes of the medium have been in place for thirty years, and I'm still not convinced that any given work of IF deserves to be called a "classic."
But as far as claiming that video games can't be art, because Plants Vs. Zombies and Call of Duty: Black Ops aren't art... I have Alfred Stieglitz on line one, and he doesn't sound happy.
1 "Professor" Brian Moriarty is the author of Trinity, one of the earliest computer games to be widely acclaimed as a work of art.
2 Actually, the "kitsch vs sublime art" discussion has both classist and McCarthyite overtones ('art for the masses / political purposes isn't Real Art'), but I've lost track of where I came across that argument, so I'll continue to gloss over it. Hazards of taking five days to write a post without tracking one's sources.
Moriarty1 goes on to provide definitive proof that video games are not and cannot be art, as he and Ebert define art.
He makes three main arguments. Two are in support of the idea that video games are not now art. First, video games are produced under huge commercial pressures and as such tend heavily towards being kitsch, not sublime art. (His exploration of "kitsch" is, incidentally, rather insightful.) These market pressures mean that the only people producing games that might be art are "the people who create art anyway." They haven't succeeded yet, in part because the medium is incredibly fragmented. There's been no real opportunity for anyone to fully master the creation of video games, not when tools change half a dozen times in a decade.
These are fair enough as far as they go, and not even all that controversial2. From my perspective there's a sharp divide between the "artistic" and "gameplay" portions of something like Shadow of the Colossus. It's a good game, and a game that Makes One Think, but the gameplay doesn't feel all that tied to the Thinking. Still, that doesn't mean that a closer marriage of the two is impossible.
That's where Moriarty's third point comes in and carries most of the weight. This, really, is his argument that video games cannot be art.
For Moriarty, "sublime art is the still evocation of the inexpressible." It's that word, "still," that's the source of all the trouble. In his view art is not something you the viewer participate in, it's something you contemplate. The minute you start making conscious choices you lose the capability to contemplate, to develop and to experience the transcendental insights that are the goal of art.
Rubbish.
The strong form of the hypothesis can be disposed of trivially. In 2006 I visited the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and spent some time in the modern art exhibitions, among them Thomas Hirschhorn's Cavemanman. Hirschhorn constructed a cave system out of cardboard, tape, and aluminum foil, with bits of detritus scattered throughout. You, the viewer, walk through it; you choose in what order you encounter the various pieces of the installation. Or take a less avant-garde example, say, looking at a painting. To some extent you're choosing what part of the picture to focus on. You're making choices that shape your experience. There is no way to experience a work of art without making decisions about how you experience it.
So what Moriarty is reduced to is the idea that the choices one makes in service of contemplating Art are qualitatively different from the choices one makes in playing a videogame.
Again, rubbish. Take Emily Short's Galatea, which she describes as "a single conversation with a single character, which can end any of a number of ways.... [it has] a large number of endings, some more satisfactory than others, of which many could be considered 'win' states." Galatea is a character study, qualitatively no different from, say, Citizen Kane. The main difference between the two is that Welles decreed an order for the viewer to uncover aspects of Kane's character, while in Galatea you're discovering them for yourself.
Welles's well-defined ordering can be part of the artistic experience, certainly. It's not a defining characteristic. Cavemanman dispenses with that notion quite handily.
"But Galatea's not a game!" the purists cry. I'd disagree, but it's a fair criticism. For a more "game-like" experience, there's Andrew Plotkin's Hunter, in Darkness. You have a goal: kill the beast. The exploration and puzzle-solving you do is almost entirely in service of that goal. Zarf's writing is wonderfully atmospheric; in at least one place I had to force myself to type the next command, to see what came next. And as the game progressed, I found my thoughts on the protagonist evolving. By the end I had to confront what "I" as the protagonist had done thus far, and what that said about "me" that I was willing to do those things.
It's no coincidence that my examples are drawn from interactive fiction. Zarf's current project aside, IF has none of the commercial pressures that drive art towards kitsch, and the broad strokes of the medium have been in place for thirty years, and I'm still not convinced that any given work of IF deserves to be called a "classic."
But as far as claiming that video games can't be art, because Plants Vs. Zombies and Call of Duty: Black Ops aren't art... I have Alfred Stieglitz on line one, and he doesn't sound happy.
1 "Professor" Brian Moriarty is the author of Trinity, one of the earliest computer games to be widely acclaimed as a work of art.
2 Actually, the "kitsch vs sublime art" discussion has both classist and McCarthyite overtones ('art for the masses / political purposes isn't Real Art'), but I've lost track of where I came across that argument, so I'll continue to gloss over it. Hazards of taking five days to write a post without tracking one's sources.