by Steven Sukkau
In an introspective meditation on attending Pax East for the first time as a journalis t, Adam Harshberger writes about the developing medium of video games .S tunned by a sculpture near the Boston Convention and Exhibition Centre , Harshberger questions whether any video games on display at the industry gathering of our best and brightest can match The Partisans statue in sheer emotional power and raw human experience:
It’s an honest and humbling reflection, one we might all agree with. Harshberger does takes hope, however, in the intelligence and thoughtful discourse around video games, suggesting “You don’t hear people talk about boobs and explosions: they’re talking about mechanics, and technology, and the plotlines of games, and how it made them feel.” citicinggames criticism by Bitmob alumni Dennis Scimeca, or Kotaku’s Jason Schreier hosting a panel on the challenges of plot and gameplay, Harshberger notes that smart people capable of creating art, are talking intelligently about how video games could be art and why the medium has yet to reach its peak artistic potential.
And yet, the feeling he presents of being “not quite there yet” his article. So what’s holding us back?
Harshberger identifies two challenges that keep us from calling our games art, neither are easily overcome, if not impossible. The first is the video game industry itself. Compared to where you would enjoy the artistry of sculpture like The Partisans, on a quiet, unassuming sunny bridge walkway where you might eat your lunch in silence, video games are displayed at PAX, “with the subtly or a roaring tank brigade. It’s part of the industry, I guess, and it’ll never go away.”
But there is hope, as even now, games are being presented in thoughtful, sophisticated ways like at the Smithsonian. While rare, it does give us a new glimpse into the artistic merit of interactive games.
However, while the noisy, bombastic world of the video game industry may not change, does taking games into a more artistic space really help? I would say yes, to a point, but there’s something I think we all overlook, that is art is consumed differently than video games. We cannot interact with the Partisans, the stone horses and their melancholy riders frozen in time, as we would with a digital avatar.
I believe that the beauty Harshberger in regarding the statue came from meditation, the internal dialogue only afforded by a body and mind at rest. If he had hurried by like other pedestrians on their way to the convention centre, their minds consumed by problem solving and striving towards a destination with a time schedule, are unable to reflect and experience the art.
What I found on reading Harshberger’s article was that his encounter on a bridge in Boston suggests video games, by their nature, are antithetical to art. If by definition, games task players with mental and physical challenges, complete with a destination and often times a time schedule or urgency to continue, they are incapable of interacting an art object with the meditative approach necessary for contemplation.
Harshberger writes “That sculpture made me momentarily forget my plans, and I had no choice but to stop and examine it. That’s what great art should do, I think: punch you in the gut, somehow. Fascinate you, make you stare, make you not give a shit if you’re late to an appointment.” While video games may often make us late for real world appointments, they themselves become virtual appointments, still interacting with our brains in the way people navigate their way to a convention centre, not the way a striking sculpture makes us pause.
This is why I think it’s a false gesture to suggest, as Harshberger does, that “Videogames are young, having been around less than a century. Compare that to sculpture, which is so old it’s almost impossible to give it a starting date.”
Time may have a small bearing on the artistic potential of a medium, but only for a very short time as the most rudimentary technology advances, and even then still with very little impact. However, the stark differences in how we experience a medium have a far greater effect. Yes, the first sculpture was probably primitive, barely resembling the artist’s vision. But I imagine even those early statues carved of stone or wood would have a far greater emotional and contemplative impact on the viewer than Mario or Sonic. It’s not how many years artists need to perfect polygon counts or stone masonry, but rather how our brains work when we’re solving problems like in a video game, or contemplating an unmoving object.
Like Brendan Keogh writes in “Chasing Mirages, Turning Videogame Criticism Away from the Future ,” we shouldn’t spend too much of our time pining for a future paradise of video games, pinning our hopes on the next generation of artists: he writes “What videogames ‘should’ be is a conceptual dead end. Instead we must look at what videogames are–what they actually already are–and try to understand that.”
We may one day have the kinds of video games capable of moving us to question what it means to be human, games that make us stop and stare, the games that validate the medium as an artistic expression, but at that point, I doubt we could call them video games.
For now, video games are not art, at least not in the same way as the sculpture of the Polish underground fighters emotionally punched Harshberger in the stomach, causing him to pause and reflect. But what we do have, are incredible perspective altering experiences like Fez. Uncomfortable, and unnerving looks into the human psyche in games like Catherine, and startling and engrossing visual landscapes of Limbo. These are valuable, meaningful experiences, but are they invalidated because they aren’t considered traditional art?
I believe we do ourselves and developers a disservice by holding up these creations to different mediums; the comparisons are not helpful to anyone. Instead it’s time we start playing and valuing game experiences for what they are, not what we would like them to become.
