Are games art? The question still lingers, even after all these years. It's the argument. It's the elephant in the room, the pall that hangs over video games, coloring every broad dialogue about the medium's strengths, goals, and power. The only remedy is to bring it up, stare it in the face until it realizes it doesn't have the stones, and then patiently wait for it to slink back into the collective subconscious.
So. Concerning the debate over whether or not video games are art: Take all the tirades from impassioned players and proud designers, the smug dismissals from naysayers and once-proud scholars of other arts, the Roger Eberts, the Seth Schiesels, every sub-argument and participant, every defender, every aggressor -- forget them. It's over. The only serious consideration we need to give the issue from here on out depends on the Supreme Court of the United States' decision regarding the constitutionality of California's law on the sale of violent video games. If the Court decides that video games are somehow classified as a category of speech unprotected by the first amendment, then sure, we should start arguing about whether or not games are art. For right now, though, forget it. Video games are art, as capable of exploring the human condition and making a statement as any novel, film, song, or surrealist art installation. If you happen to find yourself still troubled by games' most vocal opponents, take a deep breath and remind yourself that the majority of those opponents are old and easily frightened. Have some sympathy for them.
Actually, that's unfair. Most people who argue that games are not art are just illiterate. Ugly as that word is, it isn't meant to be disparaging. It's difficult for someone who has never seriously played games, or even people with casual experience, to understand how a video game can affect human emotion, how it could possibly reach into the hearts and minds of its audience. It's almost impossible for someone who's not game-literate to understand how a video game can create meaningful experiences. Unlike paintings, sculptures, films, books, photographs, or songs, video games rely on the audience's ability to touch them to be complete creative works. It is the only art form that always requires its audience to physically engage with its hands for its purpose to be realized. A movie must be watched, a book must be read, and a drawing must be seen, but a game must be played.
That fundamental misunderstanding over what games are and how they work is at the heart of why the argument over whether or not games are art persists. It's not the only reason, however. The medium is young. Far from its infancy, sure, but not necessarily matured, and the most powerful, artful games are generally unknown to larger audiences. Tom Bissell, author of the new book Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, notes that video games' quick evolution over the past 30 years explains much of the cultural resistance to the medium.
"Video games began as quarter-eating time-wasters. Then they became toys. Suddenly they're art," says Bissell. "Those are real conceptual leaps, if you haven't kept up with games." For those who number among the ranks of Generation X, the Millennials, or even the pups of Generation Tech who have grown up playing games, those conceptual leaps have been gradual. We've had the benefit of experiencing video games' growth into artfulness in real time, so we naturally accept their merits. This acceptance also highlights the medium's youth. Games have only existed, barring a few notable exceptions, for 35 years. In April's 1UP Whiteboard, Scott Sharkey noted how it took decades for film to be considered more than a stray amusement, but the journey from what people see as a peasant's diversion to art-with-a-capital-A typically takes even longer. It took the novel, arguably the most readily identifiable medium for narrative as art, hundreds of years to be recognized as what academics call high culture.
Long-form written fiction, from the trashiest Dan Brown style paperback to the most complex prose of writers like Roberto Bolano, is unquestioningly considered art. That wasn't always the case. The University of the Arts teacher and author of Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature's 50 Greatest Hits, Jack Murnighan, explains why it might be wise for players to not get bent out of shape when their preferred medium is slighted as low culture. "As with any medium, the novel always had higher and lower incarnations, those intended for mass appeal and those created with more care and higher ambitions. Many of the books called the 'first' novels are quite high- and lowbrow at the same time. Don Quixote is a prime example." Quixote was a widely read and loved work immediately after its publication in the 17th century, but that didn't keep people from dismissing the form for centuries afterward. "The novel went through a long phase where it was considered either 'low' reading or women's reading," says Murnighan. "There's an amusing line in Madame Bovary [Flaubert's seminal 19th century novel] about how she got her revolutionary -- and ostensibly amoral -- ideas from having 'dirtied her hands with the greasy dust of old lending libraries' and how "it was decided to keep Emma from reading novels.'" That the argument over games being art is still going on isn't simply unsurprising; it's practically essential as a rite of passage for the medium. Time, though, is only the first significant hurdle standing between games and their place in artistic canon.