Can a Video Game Be a Work of Art?
>
Noodle93/flickr
I've stood at the pinnacle of a grass-blown knoll overlooking the sea, a view that stretched to comprehend a country of sprawling islands traversed but by my sailboat and me. I take played a musical musical instrument that controls the air current. I've been a sword-wielding teenage adventurer, a ghostbuster, and a short Italian plumber in search of his kidnapped love.
Roger Ebert would say that none of these experiences were real or meaningful because they happened through video games. In a recent post, merely entitled "Video games can never be art" published on his Chicago Lord's day-Times blog, the famed picture critic shoots down one of my favorite art forms every bit unable to fulfill his definition of 'art'. The critic reacts specifically to a TED talk given by contained game developer Kellee Santiago of thatgamecompany, a video game product firm known as a forerunner in a movement that takes for granted that video games are art. The flim-flam, according to Santiago, is to brand them nifty art. I concur.
Just let's hear Ebert brand his argument for himself. The critic first dismisses videogames as art on the grounds that they are foremost games, and games, having rules and objectives, tin be "won". Traditional art forms, "a story, a novel, a play," he writes, "are things y'all cannot win; you can only feel them." He measures video games against the Platonic definition of fine art as an imitation of nature and reality. Ebert writes, "[art] grows improve the more it improves or alters nature through a passage through what nosotros might phone call the artist'south soul, or vision." He concedes that he thinks fine art is "ordinarily the cosmos of ane artist," and does not believe video games, the products of large teams are capable of having a singular artistic "vision" behind them.
But video games are zilch if non experiential. They are visuals and music and verse all wrapped up into a single parcel. A video game isn't just a game—it is a controlled passage through an overwhelming artful experience. This is as well the basis for my own definition of art as any sensory aesthetic experience that provokes an emotional response in its audience, be it wonder, anger, love, frustration or joy.
Yoshi's Island fills me with the same awe as a total-flower Matisse canvas. Super Mario 64 is equally much of a world to me equally that created in The Godfather, with as much directorial vision as Coppola. And I tin can fifty-fifty explore it at my own complimentary volition! Video games are art because they inspire united states of america and brand us experience and give us experiences unreachable within the realm of the real. Information technology doesn't thing if it'southward the fantasy of Pokémon and taking pride in caring for something as information technology grows or Ta-Nehisi Coates' escapist immersion in Globe of Warcraft as a place with politics and race and social conflicts all its ain. These emotions and experiences are gifts given to usa by video games just as whatever other fine art form.
Ebert denies video games the condition of art on a de-facto basis, having never played one himself; no video game yet has deserved his "attention long enough to play it." This is the biggest red flag in a series of holes in his argument. After all, aren't movies also produced past a team, led maybe by a manager? Video games likewise take their auteurs, directors whose overwhelming vision is the soul of their games. Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the Super Mario, Legend of Zelda and Donkey Kong serial of video games, is acclaimed as the greatest. Miyamoto'south oeuvre, with its postmodern sense of play and worlds-within-worlds-within-worlds, is as defining a trunk of fine art equally we can promise to take for the twenty-first century.
Sure, video games can be "won", merely "winning" a video game isn't just earning the almost points. Winning, in most single-player video games, involves completing the game's narrative arc, reaching the end of the plot in a way very similar to a movie's climax and denouement. Video games don't just stop at the narrative resolution, though. "Winning" frequently gains the player the ability to explore and wander at will through the game, an feel driven by aesthetics alone. Beat Super Mario World and yous'll go back and play through levels simply because they're as beautiful as Kandinsky'southward Blaue Reiter paintings. Finish the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and head dorsum to the mountains to await out over the earth, to feel the virtual air current. Video games are, if anything, more than experiential than films.
To conclude his postal service, Ebert writes, "No ane in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparing with the great poets, filmmakers, [and] novelists." Here's my shot: the sailing sequences in The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker are worthy of comparison to Coleridge's Mariner. Pokémon is a coming of age story that doesn't pander or condescend to its young audition, a self-guided Catcher in the Rye. Miyamoto has said that he came up with the original Zelda game every bit a "miniature garden that [gamers] can put inside their drawer." Besides, the countless castle of Super Mario 64 is certainly a "world in a grain of sand".
Video games allow u.s., as William Blake says, as children do, every bit Miyamoto does, to "hold infinity in the palms of your mitt and eternity in an hour." The question is not if video games authorize every bit art, or if video games tin stand to the art of the past, rather, it is how to find a new linguistic communication to speak of video games as art. In this Ebert fails entirely.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/05/why-video-games-are-works-of-art/56205/
0 Response to "Can a Video Game Be a Work of Art?"
Post a Comment