Posting about "games as art" is easy bait, but some things shouldn't be ignored, and this is one of them. Clive Barker says games are (or can be) art, Roger Ebert says they're not for the second time in a July 21 column. Famous science fiction editor Ellen Datlow affectionately calls Stephen King sui generis, while esteemed literary critic Harold Bloom opines: "The decision to give the National Book Foundation's annual award for 'distinguished contribution' to [King] is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life." Translation: My critical collective experience and education and laurels trump yours, my circles of friends is more respectable, etc.
Eat your heart out Stanley Fish.
You get the point, and we could scamper along history's corridors plucking examples of moments in which the "celebrated" and "influential" played rhetorical bloody knuckles across the table of popular discourse. I'm not here to argue one way or the other, or to trot out examples, claw apart the zeitgeist, and give you some purply video game anthems. The medium's frankly just not there yet.
So what about Ebert's claim that games can't be high art, "as [he] understands it"? Somewhere in the pretension there's a point. No game I've yet played is high art, at least not in my opinion. But I think it wouldn't be a terrible stretch to say that at least some games have included moments of...let's just say "higher artistic inclination," shall we?
Like comic books, video games are cobbled together from other mediums, with one significant difference: they rely on you to alter or reshape your experience.
What Ebert doesn't appear to grasp, is that the malleability of an experience is a collaborative process. Whether the parameters or net conspiracy translates as "high art" or no, the experience you have playing a game is at least half-defined by you. So what's Roger Ebert really saying? Essentially that -- as fundamental participants in the spontaneous re-creation of an experience -- we're mostly a bunch of hacks, that we'll always be hacks, and that aspiring to be more than hacks in a collaborative idiom is just a big fat waste of time.
And today, Ebert for the most part wins that argument. Calling games like Grand Theft Auto or Halo "high art" is rightly amusing, not to mention insulting to the games themselves, which deserve to be enjoyed without squeezing on a pair of stupid hifalutin goggles. But we've already seen glimpses of ways in which other games probe conventional boundaries. I'll forever come back to The Dark Eye, a game Ebert's almost certainly never heard of or played, in which William S. Burroughs narrates retellings of Edgar Allen Poe shorts. High art? Maybe not, but it was inarguably moving in that direction.
Don't bother defending Mario or Metroid or Zelda, or for that matter their creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, as a "high artist," or even trying to redefine what the latter term means in the context of interactive entertainment as a separate medium. It won't win any arguments with current establishmentarians. But it's not Ebert's "is" that's the issue...it's his "can't" that deserves as much scorn from film's greats like Welles, Fellini, and Bergman, as guys like Miyamoto and Molyneux.
Fortunately these things have a way of working themselves out as generations come and go, and I'll end by venturing that it won't be much of a loss when those final artificially grounded ivory pillars of misguided artistic pretension come toppling down.
P.S. - I'm off for Germany, and my layovers in Chicago and Heathrow are ridiculously unforgiving, so I'll be back either late Thursday or Friday.
