Art Games 1

Friends,

The basic assumption of this whole project is that religion is enscribed in whatever religious people have close at hand. Those who make speeches, write symphonies, or paint on paper plates with string sometimes do it with religious themes, and sometimes even as a religious practice, and they do it because that is what they can do with what is around. The digital is the question only because we have way too many ones and zeroes. But because it shows up everyplace, there is no reason to say that religion is better expressed in high (that is, elite and elitist) art than in low (that is, popular and populous) art. It would be well argued that the Christianity owes its vitality (for better and worse) more to crappy popular sermons than to the Sistine Chapel. Remember also that much of the Bible was certainly low (at least functional and popular) before it became the highest art of all. But the high does effect ranges of culture and last over periods of time inacessable to the low, and since we are turning our attention to different sorts of media, it is fair to wonder how the division between high and low art will affect the mediation of religion. For now I am particularly curious why videogame designers are not yet producing high art. Can they? Would it change the possibilities for digitally mediated religion if they were to? If Eternal Forces is a crappy popular sermon of a game (and the Wisdom Tree masterpieces of the 80s and 90s were almost blasphemous jokes), what has to happen before Sega's "David" can be produced? (This post is about games as a segue to later thinking about relgion, so if that bores you, please go bore yourself someplace else.)

But, you say, videogame art has already arrived! If art is a matter of representation filtered through the perspective of the individual creator (the view held by some Objectivists and "culture decay" theorists), if a good but simple still life is art, surely the attention to representational detail and subtle creative adjustment in even a run of the mill fighting game keeps up. And if art is about drawing the audience into an emotional relationship with the subject matter, wasn't Eternal Darkness' effort to make the player slowly lose their mind in time with the main character a moment of art (cf. Eternal Darkness review )?

The short answer is, I don't really want to argue about what is and is not art, maybe a strange position for this particular blog, but I don't. There are so many definitions of art (like "religion" or anything else that matters to at least one whole department at at least one university) that I am sure one can find examples for several of them in videogames, but that does not make videogames meaningfully art-like. It only means they are fair targets for the sort of youthful sophisty that finds art (or religion) on the fronts of cereal boxes, and often in the prizes inside.

The point is that beyond the committed faithful, those basement dwellers who want to say that Final Fantasy 7 is art, perhaps convinced that mythological themes are incredibly rare, and the aforementioned well meaning young people, there is no widespread recognition of any videogame as art. The question is not art, but high art, socially certified art. And to say that art world's indifference to videogames is only prejudicial conservatism is hardly helpful. Those who publicly recognize art have been quite willing in recent years to discuss video installations, and even some interactive digital media when presented in installation. But not videogames as gamers tend to recognize them. (For some comments on the subject which have a fine time essentializing art and complaining of antigamerism see: Are Video Games Art?)

Videogames will be high art when enough people start recognizing the artgame as a meaningful category, a change which I say will take two major changes. First, high art is a classed phenomena. The paradox is that at present high art is by and large not that produced by the wealthy, but by the poor, or atleast by a class of artisans separate from the art-buying class. The wealthiest legally recognized individuals in our culture are corporations, and when they make art they do it for the widest possible audience, necessarily classing the art as popular and thus low. Because high art is art made by the obscure but talented for the gourmet tastes of the wealthy, it seems unlikely that present videogame production models will ever produce high art at all. Anyway, can only one person own a videogame? Can it be something purchased at a premium, stored and treasured? The democritizing power of digital media continues those trends Walter Benjamin pointed out back when the issue was only copying of originals. ( "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction") Mechanical reproduction moved the primary question of artsiness from ownership to originality, and digital (re)production is moving it from originality to a sort of existential "authenticity." The digital original is always already a copy. Digital art will only be high when it can somehow be made rare.

Secondly, we will only recognize these videogames when works begin to emerge which apply common (perhaps even trite) conventions of high art, in format or in content. But again, there is no reason to whine; this is just how it works. We need several examples that will draw the eye of art scholars and connoisseurs so a conversation can begin, and so the rare breed of programmer artists (I know at least two... are you listening?) can start working to produce certified and interactive high art. Odds are that this will not mean that either the novel or the still life will be made digital (The Da Vinci Code game and Myst come close enough to each of these). Perhaps when art films rather than action flicks and kids movies are adapted as games we will start seeing it. Moreover, it will be necessary that the works not model after pre-certified art so fully that no one identifies them as games. Hypertext novels and poems have already become fairly commonplace and have already begun keeping interprising literary scholars awake at night, but neither form are recognized widely as "games."

Recently I have come across some examples which work to fit both the classed and the thematic requirements for high videogame art ( "Art Games Network" http://www.artificial.dk/articles/artgamesnetworks.htm). And even here you can rightly ask which of these qualify as either games or art. Pac Mondrian (not to be confused with the cosplay character, who is undoubtably art) is a game loosely based on art, but hardly any more a digital artgame than drawing mustaches on reproductions of paintings would be an analog artgame. The same, I suppose, could be said of Natalie Bookchin's adaptation of Borges' "The Intruder," but because it is the single most dramatic dramatic reading of a short story I have ever encountered, I think it deserves particular mention at least as a notable continuation of that tradition. Play it. The Super Mario clouds and Distellamap, may or may not be art, but they are from games, not games in their own right. I recommend all of you dig through the rest of these and think about whether any of them could ever be recognized as art outside of gaming circles. And while you are at it, go and see The Polyphonic Spree's "The Quest for the Rest" , and ( "Operation Urban Terrain" ), a deeply inventive something which strains between game, protest, and artform. Of course, there remains the problem of rarity in all of these cases, but for now obscurity should serve about the same function as would private ownership. Maybe digital high art will only last as long as anything else digital, remaining high for a time and suddenly falling into pop culture banality once people know they are interested.

Frankly, I can't say anything else until I have more sincere candidates. You can only say so much about non-existence. If you have some artgames that have a shot, please send me links. I'd love to make a nice list.

Cheers,
Vince(nt)