Video Games As Art
A mini-essay concerning how we discuss the medium.
Non-negotiable, erratic, dizzying, manic, inspiring, awe-inspiring, pretentious, slogging, slow, brutal, unending, demeaning, lumbering and full of quiet, foggy considerations make up a small percentage of terms, praises and insults one might use to describe the vague process of essay-writing. These words are most urgent and luminous once you’ve ploughed for long enough to find yourself within your own essay’s body. The body of an essay is long, overbearing, fading, and impossible to advocate for regarding any assumption there’s a real, coherent path outwards and towards some conclusion or happy justification that everything you’ve been writing actually had a point to begin with.
That’s where I am right now with a completely different essay on the side—not to mention a Pride-themed article even further on the side, compact with interviews, media analysis, historical research and a fair bit of autobiographical self-reflection that I’ve been running away from since starting the project three weeks ago.
So, it’s not that hard to make out that I am very busy—but more importantly, stuck. Kinder than writer’s block, this slog certainly is. My issue is not with that of a lack of imagination or content but self-wrought overstimulation and confusion brought on by too much imagination. I want to write everything, which is at least easier than writing something.
To make peace with those two large, frustrating journalistic pieces, I put my time and thoughts into this mini-essay I’ve been sketching in quiet interludes throughout the past few days. A second part may come along in the next few days.
Video Games As Art
The initial heading for this discussion on video games had been “Video Games As An Art Form”, which I quickly backspaced through upon seeing it on screen; an ugly and irresponsible way to start off what I have planned to put down here.
While the debate on video games as art is one we can call pertinent, halfway complete thanks to a combined effort comprised of industry think-pieces, video essays and a general sway in public opinion, there is zero urgency or reason to debate around the medium on its state as an art form. There is no secrecy on how overbearing most video games are as technical undertakings. Even in a perfect world, where the capitalistic torture rituals of “crunch” are non-existence, each individual, from the industry insider to the layman, should be aware that the practice of game making is hard work (though the layman wouldn’t lose out on gaining even more awareness, then finding less anguish in release date changes and announcement postponements). The public is adequately aware of what forms the medium as, well, an art form. The first thing wide-eyed players would note on their first play-throughs of each game are its “graphics”, “mechanics” or how well it runs on their computer as a coalition between smooth frame rates and stimulating, dynamic instantaneous movement.
Spectacle is unsurprisingly easy to find in a medium made through the appendages of countless other mediums all sewn into one; it even surpasses film, hoisting its exclusive capabilities in interactivity and narrative multiversality1 .
The “form” within video games has more than its required number of advocates and representatives bragging by its side. I mean that sincerely in saying “more than enough”. What might be a speed bump slowing down the full integration of video games into the same paragraph as other “high arts” (though this isn’t really a need in the first place for the medium to earn its own validation) is that most discussion has maintained a formalist angle for half of a century without much said about its spiritual (for lack of a better, clear term) capabilities, equally as important.
Video games, much like its prudish cousin which is cinema, have the unfortunate chip on its shoulder, placed immediately upon its birth, as a medium brought about in the aftermath of mass industrialization. Another sad fact surrounding the medium, which mirrors that of film, is that it is incredibly difficult to even envision its existence anytime before The Industrial Revolution. What gave it life is also its oldest, harshest defect. As the child of an epoch defined by an accelerationist desire for technological innovation and an even larger mega-epoch we know and love as late capitalism, it’s no mystery as to why video game developers (notice how even the creative heads in charge of these pieces are called developers) led their arguments for posterity with a focus on “performance”, “specs” and brilliance”.
Those early talking heads and large figures within the medium were not being wholly disingenuous. Even today, there are countless developers who see themselves just as developers; even on this hill they may still call themselves “artists”, for do we not view many mathematicians, inventors and other “technicians” as those channeling something not so different than an artist’s curiosity and spirit?
The actual, honest issue in how video games are described and discussed is in how we describe it as fans, players, critics, onlookers and even naysayers against the medium who still find it obnoxious, juvenile and as a black ingredient of social degradation and disorder amongst our ever growing, ever elusive youth2.
To paraphrase Jorge Luis Borges through his short story Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote : “censuring and praising are sentimental operations which had nothing to do with criticism”. The sentiment may come off strong—as all things praiseworthy surely deserve flowers and plenty well-formed paragraphs of criticism inevitably sway into rivers of praise or damnation if its author has any honest, sincere reaction to the piece they are confronting in their first place— yet it finds healthy use and relevance in this piece, as a lot of praise towards games comes off as labels regarding performance rather than constructive criticism.
Every art form should be held responsible to ask for and maintain its reception for criticism, in order to water its seeds anew. We, as both audience and critics (this goes down all the way to those informal, passing remarks between friends you will have a hard time recounting, that is criticism too) hold our own responsibility to go further than assigning video games a 1, 5, 9 or 10 in terms of how well it flourishes in a certain department related to form. Even the slightly more intangible field of “pacing” is something we can so easily subject to passing or failing grade, relinquishing any and all reasons to continue thinking about the piece after distinguishing a certain label and number of stars and half-stars3.
This is where video essays, a sub-genre of art criticism, has benefitted the medium (and certainly much more than it has for film, which has quietly suffered from what most creators put out there on internet film spaces; that is for another essay though). Going off the top of my head, any video essayist in the same vein of Leadhead offers substantial nourishment to the way we view and talk about video games; her idiosyncratic and at times autobiographical approach fulfills that spiritual itch/responsibility which, upon its fulfillment, allows space for discussion on the medium as an art when we have already allowed more than enough on it is an art form.
This is, in fact, in a very long-winded and slightly jilted request to talk more about how games make us feel.
It is not lost on me why praise regarding form and technology was so important during a time within both video game history and our individual histories when both could still be labeled as “adolescent”. As early innovators in a completely new medium, developers and critics would have found it best to illuminate what makes the medium unique compared to all others, with any emotional and spiritual compliments only finding legitimacy in retrospect once people have actually played these games (and from there, emerge with their own unique experiences and emotions).
As children and wide-eyed teenagers (especially within my generation, witnesses of indescribable innovations over the past twenty-five years), of course the marvel and spectacle in witnessing the pores of Arthur Morgan’s sun-burnt, booze-soaken skin4, or Psycho Mantis breaking the fourth wall and reading the details of our memory disks directly to us in the middle of the night5 or the gigantic scale of Tamriel in all its mythical bravado6; if anything, these moments of splendor should grant us the motivation and spirit to write and swoon about how these technical feats impacted us in an unspoken, sensual and potentially unintentional manner back then, vibrating into our current, quiet lives. Because that is what takes a piece of the art form towards the personal stratosphere, as a piece of art.
So much more could be (and should be) written about this topic, especially because I am afraid that it might be written as a lethal undervaluing on how much has already been written within video game spaces that already accomplish what I ask of within the industry. That is not my intention at all. Just like how film circles made sure to push spiritual, transgressive and sensual film writers like Pauline Kael and Jonathan Rosenbaum to the forefront of film criticism, the same should occur within the medium I have taken to writing about here. This would prove incredibly fruitful, considering how many psychological and idiosyncratic experiences occur while playing a video game (even watching other people play in living rooms and through YouTube Let’s Plays deserves alleys full of texts and notes on the matter) which might outnumber the possibilities within film, as it entails nearly every experience possible within film (except those heavily dependent on the viewer’s passiveness, of which the exact percentage that takes up is up for debate) while holding privilege to a vast amount of experiences only possible through the player’s interaction, deliberation before interaction and responses after interaction. For now, though, we’ll call it a wrap. I hope you enjoyed reading this mini-essay, and we’ll see you at the movies as always!
It has not evaded me that there are many, many films which can easily be described as “multiversal”, whether in reference to those that loop and repeat themselves, such as Right Now, Wrong Then (2015) and Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), those with identical parallel narratives intertwined but also branching out to reveal minute butterfly effects captured within acts of individual agency (Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Veronique (1991) is most appropriate here) or films you can quite literally find and watch multiple versions of, such as The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby (2014) and Clue (1985). Video games still hold their privilege, as its multiversality is dependent on the player’s (even this distinction between the “player” of a video game and the “audience” of a film is pointing towards what I’m getting at) own narrative actions, which unfold within its constructed world rather than through the audience downloading multiple files of one film or passively observing the multiple thread in Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) without any input whatsoever. Passionate, dreamy filmmakers have brought themselves close though, and have in fact trespassed this boundary so much so that one has to argue if their exploits still count as films once we get down to semantics; Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018) is an obvious choice though no nowhere near the first attempt at the form, which would be Kinoautomat (1967) in my opinion.
Funny enough, though, since most people who look down on video games have no interest in learning what actually makes up the medium regarding its form and technological makeup, they have the upper hand in actually viewing the medium through a more spiritual and social sense. The problem, of course, is the puritanical flavour in which they’ve branded video games, which is obviously a problem across all artforms. And yet, video games (with anime as a close second) own the toughest battle against its detractors due to their high numbers.
Consider how many films there are which you only remember watching when you come across your wordless star-rating on Letterboxd, sitting quietly while you scratch and wonder why you forgot about something you so clearly enjoyed watching in the moment.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Metal Gear Solid (1998)
Skyrim (2011)