Don’t worry, kids, you won’t need any PVA glue. I just want to talk about this whole “games are art” thing that everyone seems to be getting themselves all miffed about.
It seems to be the case that some people who’d never played a game in their lives one day decided that games weren’t art. And in typical internaut fashion, a group of individuals who’d played games throughout their entire lives suddenly felt that the opinions of the former group of individuals somehow mattered to them, but also that they were wrong.
You may have seen this before; do you recognise it? If you said something along the lines of “bloody fanboys”, then you are correct. Two groups trying to convince one another of an argument the other is not willing to lose on the basis that they’d already convinced themselves that they are right. You’ve got the gaming fanboys, the film fanboys and the people who likes both films and gaming and who are also considered by the two former groups to be total arsehats. What does this conflict solve? The answer is, as usual, precisely fuck all.
What’s more, everybody seems to have forgotten that it’s easy enough to dismiss something as being as worthless as a pile of shit when you’ve had little or no experience of it. These people are only judging the artistic integrity of every game ever based on a train of thought that they’ve developed for an entirely different medium, namely films. Roger Ebert in particular has stated he has no interest in gaming, yet somehow gamers still show interest in what he has to say on games. Why? You might as well have asked the opinion of a passing badger.
Roger Ebert was really the main reason I wrote this, or rather a piece that he wrote on the subject of video games and why they can never be art was. Back in 2010, Ebert made some understandable points about what should, in his view, define an art form – I almost feel bad saying that they’re horribly wrong. Clive Barker, the filmmaker, summed up Ebert’s stance very succinctly:
“I think that Roger Ebert’s problem is that he thinks you can’t have art if there is that amount of malleability in the narrative. In other words, Shakespeare could not have written ‘Romeo and Juliet‘ as a game because it could have had a happy ending, you know?”
This also touches on the problem I have with Ebert’s argument; it’s very easy to say that Romeo and Juliet would have been a shit game because it’s been approximately 400 years since it was written and every Tom, Dick and Harry has ejaculated about how fucking amazing it is to some degree or other. Would Hard Boiled have been quite the same balls-to-the-wall action fest if it was a text-based adventure game? Of course not. It’s a stupid argument to make.
What I’m trying to say is that games are unlike any medium that has come before it, so why should whatever artistic value they may or may not possess be measured against a benchmark that was meant for something almost entirely different? It’s like trying to measure the performance of a car by cutting it in half and counting it’s damned rings.
But anyway, why do games need to be art? Can’t you just enjoying the fucking things as they are? Will having their artistic value credited by someone that both you and I probably couldn’t care less about make any difference to how you perceive or consume video games? “Will it fuck”, as we say here in Scotland. If Ebert suddenly decided that bacon was art, I would still eat it the same way I always did: with a fucking shovel. A “games are art” situation would be no different.
Apart from the shovel bit. Duh.
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