Sometimes Comic Blog

I’ve been thinking what makes Video Games different from other mediums of Art, and I keep coming back to the idea that we, the audience, ask Video Games to lie to us, above any other medium.

For all intents and purposes, when we play a game, we become that character, that’s one of this medium’s strengths. But would you play a video game if the main character was you? With all your strengths and weaknesses, all your faults and foibles? We ask for the lie of being better than ourselves in order to enjoy what the game has to offer. Since we are, in effect, the main character, are all actions made by the player the truth? If I go out of the way to make my Fable character gay, while another player makes them straight, what is the truth there? If characterization is an amalgam of other people’s evaluation of that character, what does that say if in one instance a character is nice and in another he’s evil? When I play Prototype, I go out of my way not to kill civilians. I’m pretty sure I’m one of the few people who do that, especially since there’s a perk that gives you more power if you’ve overfed before battle. Now who is Alex Mercer?

When we watch a play, we know we aren’t the characters on stage. We may identify with them, but we do not control their actions. And if they portray their roles dishonestly we often fault them for it. One of my pet peeve plots are what I call “Body Snatcher” movies, for obvious reasons. If all the characters are all lying to me because in the end they will turn out to be aliens, what do I care about their motivations? If Blorzak as Tim, unbeknownst to me, pretends to fall in love with Sandy then what do I care about that relationship if in the end Blorzak eats Sandy? This is worse with a long running television show because the lie could be told for thirty episodes instead of thirty minutes.

But this is an inherent strength in Video Games. The better the lie, especially in the character I control, the more fun it is to play. Would I rather be myself, who can jump about a foot and a half off the ground, or Mario, who can manage ten times his own height?

As games try to become more Realistic, in at least looks, are they creating a better lie? A lot of discussion gets thrown around about the uncanny valley. Is the main problem not that the characters become unrealistic or robotic, but that the lie becomes too easy to spot? If Art is about expressing some kind of truth, and I’m not saying that it has to be, where does that leave Video Games? The more truthful the game gets, the less fun it will be to play. The Portal Gun is way more interesting than a musket. Halo is more fun than Passage.

And that’s the crux of the matter. Gamers have to decide whether it’s more important for a game to be fun than to be honest. Do we like being lied to? Artists have to decide if it’s possible to be fun and honest, or if they care that bad game mechanics are worth it for expression.

Do we want the lies?

Why do we have to keep having the “Video Games are Art” discussion? Because after two hundred years, photography is still having this conversation and if we want to keep moving this medium along we have to constantly be analyzing the reasons why we consider it an art form. And while video games at this point in time are judged based on their relationships to other mediums, it is through this internal study that we will develop how it moves into its own.

Let us keep with the photography example to continue this conversation. There’s a period in Photography becoming an art form where artists felt that in order to become worthy of the “Fine Art” moniker that they had to imitate painting. This was called Pictorialism. During this period, lasting roughly thirty years, photographers would apply any technique they could think of to hide the fact that they were photographs. Soft focus, gum bichromate, negative scratching, nothing was above omission because these photographers thought that if they were ever going to be respected, they needed to conform to the old guard’s idea of what Art was. (See Steichen’s “Moonrise”)

Of course what naturally occurred was the development of Straight Photography by the f/64s, the antithesis to Pictorialism, in which the inherent qualities of a photograph are considered the art form. They essentially thumbed their noses at painting, and explored what photography as a medium was capable of doing better than any other medium, which for them was to say that it could capture a scene in a way that painting was unable to at the time.

Painting, the much older medium, is now in turn greatly influenced by photography, from the cropped off edges of Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergere” to the Photorealism of Estes’ “Telephone Booths”. If it weren’t for photography constantly re-examining itself and where they fit in the world of art, it wouldn’t be as respected as it is today. And photographers still have to fight tooth and nail to be considered an art form. I still hear the argument that, “Anyone can take a photograph, therefore it’s not really art.”

What does this means for Video Games? The moment that we stop arguing for the medium as an art form, the moment we stop looking at ourselves is the moment we stop evolving into the Art we were meant to be. At this point we’re Pictorialists, grasping onto film for dear life. We haven’t decided what it means to be a video game or what video game art will produce in the future. So I, for one (of many), will continue to talk about it until I’m blue in the face. Or until I’m dead, which is probably more likely giving the length of time it takes to get any respect in the art world.

In 1954, Frederick Wertham wrote a book entitled Seduction of the Innocent, in it he decried the medium of the comic book as nothing but a mass collection of depictions of sex, violence and drug use. In 1963, Roy Lichtenstein created “Whaam!”, a 5’7” x 13’4” blow-up of two panels from the DC comic “All-American Men of War”, turning comic books into Pop Art. In 2005, 2007, and 2010 (at least), Roger Ebert made the comment that video games cannot be art. In 2006, Rod Humble creates, “The Marriage” with the expressed intent of making an “Art Game”.

Authorial Control

Fluxus was a 1960s performance art group that was interested in the barriers between Audience and Performance. Their work was published in step by step magazines that could be bought by anyone and performed anywhere. This breaking down of performer and viewer was the beginning of video games as an art form.

Take Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece”. It is an example of interactive art. This “performance” puts Ms. Ono on the stage with a pair of scissors. She says nothing, as the audience decides what to do with her. Mostly, they use the scissors to cut pieces of her dress away until she is left naked. There are many arguments as to the interpretation of this performance, but for this essay all I am concerned about is that there is an interaction between the art and the audience. See, we forget that not all art depends on the telling of a story. The parallels to video games are abundant here. The audience becomes the controller of this game; a player could just as easily steal the scissors as they can cut the dress, which would radically alter the experience for that player and all the players that came after them. This performance is a prime example of a sand box game, in which all tools are provided for the player, and what they do with them is up to their imagination. Just because there is no screen between the performer and the controller doesn’t make it any less of a game.

Whenever someone makes an argument that the player interaction prevents it from being a work of art, I tell them that they are forgetting their history lessons. Authorial Control in art was abandoned a long time ago.

High Art vs. Low Art

The only point in making a distinction between High and Low art is to discriminate. The line between the two is so blurry as to be non-existent. Is Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” high art, while Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace low? Leonardo’s Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” high, Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” low? Depending on what decade or century you’re in, they were probably both. By calling something High Art, no characteristics are added to the work. If you call something a painting, there is an idea, albeit a very basic one, of what that object is. You will never find a lover of some art medium that will call their own interests as Low Art unless accompanied by a sneer of contempt for the phrase or as an attempt to be ironic.

Containers of Art

At the barest minimum, a video game is a container of art, a museum of art if you will. Each creature, location, movement (see Cubism) is a work of art. Would you go to the Louvre and say, “The Louvre is not art; it’s a container for art!”? If you place a painting in a bag, is that bag not a part of the art? What if you paint the bag? The Legend of Zelda was in a gold casing, now is it a piece of art? What if it was a bag painted by an artist? Does a machine making the container preclude it from being a work of art? Andy Warhol would disagree.

And if you think that Art can only be authored by a single individual, just think, was the Sistine Chapel only made my Michelangelo? Do you think that the Parthenon in Athens was carried out by one person?

What critics of art forget is that even inexperienced attempts of art are still art. Take any history of film class and you won’t start with Citizen Kane, you start with vaudeville. When you watch a silent film, you don’t think, “This is trash!” you think, “What imagination and talent!” We may say that Video Games are in their infancy, but the idea of games as art has been around for at least a century. When the Dadaist played Exquisite Corpse they were making art into a game.

In this defense I have referenced many pieces of artwork. I suggest looking up each and every one of them, because to exclude experience with them, you only hurt yourself. Also, if you’re going to make an argument against a particular art form, I would at least suggest interacting with them before making your opinions known. Otherwise you’ll just come off as uninformed and prejudiced.

And I don’t think it’s going to be outside of my lifetime before we see video games as an art form. They already are seen as an art form, and by an ever increasing number of people. It only takes one, and we have the Post Modernists to thank for that.

…Paul, what kind of animations would you like to do for a living?

I always feel awkward, and usually just tell people, “Props, Sets and Environments” and leave it at that. Little do they know that I would be ecstatic to the silverware placed on the napkin in a dining room in a shack that no one ever enters because there’s no game value in it for the Hello Kitty MMO.

I would make it for a living and love it!

My favorite part about animation is the non-moving parts. Don’t get me wrong, when I work on my own projects I tend to do minimalist artsie animations. But give me a stylized world to design props for and I melt. The less polygons the better. World of Warcraft would be a dream for me because of the combo of history and style that they put into their world. Every house in that game has a history behind it that goes for hundreds of years. And if I could make the vase that was passed down for generations before ultimately being broken and tossed into a corner after an attack by a deserter from the dwarven army after running away from a rampaging time dragon… well you get the idea.

I realize I’m years away from working on a world that rich in history, especially if I keep working on projects such as the one following this confession, but if you ever hear me say, “Oh, I do props, sets, and environments,” in my mind I’m intensely dreaming about pink hearted spoons and dusty pieces of a vase.

Dear Paul,

We are happy to tell you that BLOCK PUPPY was chosen by the filmmakers Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar as the SECOND PRIZE WINNER in our stop-motion animation contest!

They praised it for its “graphic creativity.” Congratulations!

You will receive a poster and a copy of the DVD when it is released in July of this year.

Your film is now on our Town Called Panic Contest YouTube page!

http://www.youtube.com/ZeitgeistContest (Edit: The second one, cause I’m second place!)

All the best,

Adrian Curry
Design Director

ZEITGEIST FILMS LTD