Games as Art: the argument within the argument

I had a long argument last night with my pal Graham, revisiting the old “can video games be art” debate that tends to flare up now and then. The flare in Graham’s living room was provoked by Roger Ebert’s latest essay on the matter, which was in turn provoked by a recent TED talk by Kellee Santiago.

I won’t rehash our back-and-forth, because I think I already expressed my thoughts sufficiently in a previous weigh-in. I’m on the anti side, for what it’s worth.

In any case, regardless of the substance of the two sides’ arguments, it’s the meta-issues surrounding the debate that I’m finding to be the most interesting dimension of this saga.

The pro-games-as-art people don’t seem to have a lot of material evidence to support their side, so they turn to semantics. Lacking a great roster of impressive “art” games to cite, they endlessly deconstruct the very idea of art until it’s open enough to encompass gaming. The anti-games-as-art people, for their part, can’t seem to nail down a workable definition of the concept, and instead make appeals to art’s broader, vaguer traditions and aesthetic conventions, which games, they argue, are inherently incomparable with.

You can therefore distill the essence of this argument to a battle between those who believe traditional notions of what constitutes “respectable culture” deserve reverence, and those who hate being bound to the antiquated standards of the past. Or, to distill even further, it’s feud between established adult authority and frustrated adolescence non-conformity.

I recently finished reading The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein, which makes a very persuasive case that my generation, the post-boomer generation of the 80s and 90s, is uniquely ignorant in our monstrously poor grasp of civics, history, philosophy, and culture. I think the young Ms. Santiago, with her perky, valley girl defense of gaming through Wikipedia quotes, Google image search jpgs, and the comedy stylings of David Cross’, is a great poster-child of that critique. Her lecture hardly presents an image of a woman who thinks seriously about art or history as an end unto itself, as opposed to a temporarily useful divergence to justify the respectability of something she likes.

It’s evidenced by the extremely ahistorical way she presents the history of film and television, portraying them as mediums society initially dismissed as “just fun and simple mindless entertainment,” which allowed them to devolve into the “superficial and empty” schlock of today, since no one expected anything better. The argument is that we didn’t fully “recognize the power of the medium” back then, and we shouldn’t turn our backs on games the same way today, lest they similarly devolve into crap (or stay the crap they already are at present, rather).

It’s an ignorant analysis because television and film have been, in fact, enormously controversial and seriously studied from day one. In every decade the technology of moving-pictures has existed there have been great men forging prominent careers with the goal of analyzing such media on cultural, moral, philosophical, and artistic grounds. Men like Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931), who authored the groundbreaking The Art of the Moving Picture in 1915, or the philosopher Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) who spoke of the metaphysical escapism of cinema, or the director-critic André Bazin (1918-1958) who advocated radical notions of film “purism,” or the great Canadian scholar Marshall McLuchan (1911-1980) with his “medium is the message” memes, or the social commentator Neil Postman (1931-2003) who cynically branded TV as the modern opiate of the masses.

Their critiques about modern visual media were not merely “this is good” or “this is stupid,” but rather profound, complex theories and assessments of the existential component parts of these new forms of media; how their technological limitations biased the presentation of information, how they stimulated certain senses of the viewer over others, and what new paradigms of communication and truth they would proceed to impose upon larger society.

So we can’t simply pretend that movies and television have somehow been blown off by legitimate criticism until just recently, or that all early reaction by serious people was dopey and dismissive. And if there’s too much trash in our dens and theaters today, we can’t portray this as a byproduct of a lack of meaningful engagement with the mediums themselves, since analyzing the socially destructive or artistically enriching possibilities of new media has always been one of the defining themes of media studies. More modern thinkers like McLuchan and Postman, for instance, would argue that the production of crap has just as much to do with the inherent limitations of media technology itself, and the economic models used to sustain the content-generation industry.

Now I’m no genius in the field of media criticism, nor an expert in the theories and ideas promoted by thinkers like those cited above, and I don’t think that should disqualify me from spouting off on matters related. But I am still aware and appreciative that there is a very significant intellectual tradition regarding this kind of stuff,and it seems to me that the people who constantly beat the “games-as-art” drum should at least be vaguely aware of it too, rather than having to make their augments through Spider-Man quotes and X-Box Live sales statistics.

If you’re making what is supposedly a serious argument in such a profoundly unserious way, either through cutesy naivete or spittle-spraying vitriol (the latter of which has been the approach of the Penny Arcade boys) then it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that you are not operating from serious motives. Indeed, the motive may be just that — to contest the very worth of seriousness itself, in favor of non-judgment towards young adults who enjoy children’s playthings. Which is not really an argument about art at all.