Can Video Games be Art

[A work in progress]

kato
kato
Sep 9, 2018 · 7 min read

The other day I loaded up onto my family television screen the start of a movie, which begins with the angelic and adorable face of a playful infant girl, instantly creating in us the inevitable emotional attachment to the baby. We see the man holding her, a burly bearded man in primitive garb, and we see his home, a simple wooden hut from an ancient society. The man is entrusted with the care of the infant. Today is the day of consecration for the infant, by the customs and rituals of this society’s animistic, matriarchal religion. The man is an outcast from the nearby village, which serves as a religious center, but nevertheless he travels up a mountain to the edge of a cliff where there grows an ancient tree, in order to carry out the rituals. In the background a beautiful orchestral score is playing, signaling a sacred new beginning. A priest-figure called a “matriarch” arrives from the nearby village to take part in the ritual. At the top of the massive mountain, as the ritual words flow he holds up the baby towards the sky, lion-king style, surrounded by the surreal stunning scenery of mountaintops and clouds tinted orange by the rising sun.

I was completely hooked into the story from the very first scene. The stunning scenery and the beautiful and perfectly placed score are an integral part of the experience. And it only gets better. Following the ritual we are exposed to some of the conflicts of the story, as another matriarch arrives on the scene to admonish them for breaking a taboo, as the man is an outcast, and must not be spoken to. We see a scene set a few years later, in which the infant, now a child, attempts to interact with some kids she spots, but the kids are quickly taken away by their mother to avoid interaction with the outcast. The naive girl is left crying, feeling utterly forlorn. After a few more scenes, setting up the basic facts of this engrossing ancient society, the camera pans out a little and the back of the girl is centered on the screen. I pick up my PS4 controller, giddy at the prospect of playing through the rest of this story. I was, of course, playing a video game. This one is called Horizon Zero Dawn and was developed by Guerilla Games.

I felt a sort of shiver go down my spine at certain points in the opening scenes, and another as the camera zoomed out and centered on the main character, which signaled that I would now be able to control her, to be her, within this engrossing story. This was one of the powerful emotional engagements that I have had with any media, whether it be books, music, movies, etc. My one other important and emotionally powerful moment with video games was when I started the Last of Us, from Naughty Dog. After a warm and touching scene between the father and daughter, the introduction shows us the first hint of the zombie apocalypse; the player is then given control of the daughter as she rises out of bed. The combination of the immersive graphics, story, character, and sounds added up to an overwhelming feeling, of something like anticipation and ecstasy and grandness of scale upon beginning the game.

I began by relating these experiences because they made me excited for the possibilities of this very new medium, and moved me to consider the potential of the video game. The hyper-immersive and inspiring experience that I had with the medium seems like a good place for a medium to begin its evolution towards greatness. So just how far can we take this medium? Will there ever emerge out of it an interactive experience that achieves the greatness of an Iliad, a Hamlet, or a Tristan und Isolde?

I will start by stating that I am only interested in a particular kind of art. I am not interested in everything that people refer to as art. The kind of art that I am interested in can be called ‘high art.’ It is a work of art that is esteemed by a society as great, and not just by a coterie of the elite. I make this distinction because, although there are undoubtedly works of enormous aesthetic merit that never achieve popular respect, I nevertheless believe that the attainment of it must be a prerequisite for becoming a great work of art. The ability of a work to take possession of the minds of so many, that universal appeal, shows that the work resonates with some sort of Truth about human nature, or reality. High art includes the Iliad, but not a blank piece of white canvas, as seen in museums today.

High art can also be distinguished from low art, which is enjoyed exclusively by lower classes. Low art, unlike high art, lacks aesthetic quality. This is determined by the taste-making elite of the day. When a work that is characteristic of the lower classes in its themes manages to achieve aesthetic merit it becomes a work of high art. I suggest that The Potato Eaters by Van Gogh is an example of this. It depicts a working-class family during its meal in a humble shack-like home, but it manages to convey a sense of the sacred or divine somewhere in the matter-of-factness in which the family engages in the routine action, and life. Example of low art are the Fast and Furious movies and the TV show Friends. Lastly, though not in importance, I am interested only in great art, because I am exploring the highest possible attainment that video games could attain. Only high art can be great art, though not all high art is great.

I will not provide a definition of art. Any overly restrictive definition would inevitably exclude some great work of art, and any overly broad definition isn’t of much use. I will instead refer to concrete characteristics shared by, I believe, all great works of art, and see if any video games share these characteristics. Works of art have a family resemblance, and I will see if video games can ever join this hallowed family.

Immersion, or popular appeal

In the kind of art that I am talking about, the high art that can bring together an entire society in celebration and contemplation, a high degree of the ability to immerse or engage the person is necessary. The first truly great works of art, the Iliad and the Odyssey, fulfill this criteria with flying colors. Since these works were passed down originally in oral tradition, every line of each work had to be deeply memorable and engaging to the mass of people in order to survive the incredible evolution it had to have undergone over many years and many bards. The characters would also have had to be memorable and inspirational and the story deeply immersive. To this day no work or works have been so central to a society as the works of Homer were to Athens(?). Of its obvious aesthetic and literary merit, I need not say a word.

To name example of other works in our tradition of high art, we can go from the statue Laocoön and His Son, the Greek tragedies, The Aeneid, The Statue of David, the Mona Lisa, Tristan und Isolde. The greatness of all these works achieved mass recognition beyond fulfilling the prerequisite of possessing high aesthetic quality. Even when not all people had access to experiencing these works, they were nevertheless respected by the broader culture at some time.

Video games seem to fulfill this criteria of having the ability to engage and attain mass appeal. Finally, in 2018, video games are tantalizing close to achieving a semblance of photo-realism. In the games with the highest quality graphics, like Horizon Zero Dawn and Uncharted 4, the graphics are not jarring and do not pull us out of our immersion in the environments. Videos have also been deeply engaging and popular since their early years in the 1970s. In the level of sheer mental engagement, video games are probably second to none among the forms of media. I distinguish this somewhat simple type of engagement from true immersion in the narrative and world of the media. Simple engagement can rely on tricks, such as game mechanics or plot escalation, to keep the person mentally engaged. Immersion requires a deeper level of engagement in the world of the artwork. This immersion requires mental engagement, and it also requires engagement through the soul, or the body or the subconscious of the viewer.

I believe that video games have the ability to elicit immersion, or a deep engagement, in the world of the particular video game. This is what I experienced in Horizon and The Last of Us, and it account for the experiences of people who are deeply moved and inspired by video games.

The sublime

Great works of art must also give people some intimation of a higher reality, the meaning of Being, the sacred or divine, or the sublime. This criteria is met most directly in the great religious works of art, such as the Pietà, Paradise Lost, and Bach’s Mass in B minor. The other great works do fill this criteria too; the Greek tragedies put us in awe of fate, and Wagner’s operas give us an awareness of the un-individuated deeper reality.

No video game has yet to fulfill this criteria. Few have even tried. However, it does not seem impossible for a video game to strive towards this ideal.

[A work in progress]

Video games should be more closely tied to existing traditions in art.

What are video games?

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