Video Games: A Renewed Formal Focus in Arts

Presentation held on March 22 (2012) at the conference "Computer games: art, entertaining, or both?" arranged by KinoKino during the Game on-exhibition

As a former student at Kunstskolen i Rogaland (KIR) I am excited to find that the public debate on video games and their possible status as art is taking place here on the west coast. The first time computer and video games were exhibited in a Norwegian art gallery was in 2010 under the title PRESS PLAY. That was in the art and design museum, Permanenten, in Bergen - also on the west coast -, and it was followed by harsh discussions in the newspaper Bergens tidende. As far as I am concerned, such discussions have not reached a public level in Oslo, where they seem to be kept in semi-public or specialized fora. Now I am here in Sandnes, Rogaland, asking once again whether Video games should be appreciated as art or not.

This is perhaps a banal question, and one it is easy to answer with both “yes” and “no” - depending on the art definition being used. Still I claim that we benefit from asking the question now and again. There are also practical and economical reasons for doing so.

Last year (2011) Lotte Grepp Knutsen, State Secretary in the Cultural Department, claimed that computer games are interpreted as culture and to a certain extent also as “advanced art” by the funding government. Yet they have no strategies in order to stimulate experimental, small-scale productions or educational games like they have for the film industry. Computer and Video games are practically treated as a commercial field, and only that. Some game producers admit that they have no other motif for developing games than to create salable entertainment, and argue that computer and video games will never become anything else than just that (entertainment). Well, why don’t they speak for themselves.

As we just have seen with the example of Marieke Verbiesen’s game art, the commercial aspect is definitely not the driving force for all game developers, and as long as there are game producers and gamers finding that the aesthetic dimensions of games is one of the main reasons why they occupy themselves with them, there will be a debate. But so far, game aesthetics are not an established part of art theoretical discussions.

Quite on the contrary: most art theoreticians, critics and established artists answer an unequivocally NO to our question on the possible art status of video games, and my application for a doctoral degree on the aesthetics of computer games were turned down by the Faculty of Humanities at NTNU, partly with a direct rejection of my argument that the art theoretical field will benefit from aesthetical discussions following art related game theory. They had other legitimate reasons for rejecting my application, so this is not about me being sore about it. I just wonder why art-oriented scholars are not even a little bit curious about video games.

The art critic in Bergens Tidende – Øystein Hauge – demonstrated the situation very well when turning the thumb down, and quite rightfully actually, for the earlier mentioned Press Play exhibition at Permanenten. He explained that even if computer games do have aesthetical qualities, like music, graphics and narratives, they lack confirmation and credibility in the art world and can therefore not be considered art. But what kind of an argument is that? "We are not interested in your medium, therefore we are not interested in your medium"? And what exactly is - ”the art world”?

Fortunately, Hauge pretty much explained that too, arguing that “art value” (he used the Norwegian term “kunstverdi”) is something we create and not something that can be discovered or revealed (”kunstverdi er noe vi finner opp, ikke noe som avdekkes” BT, 26.9.2010). I guess he meant "revealed by engaging certain criterions for aesthetically evaluation". Hence Hauge, like most of today’s art theoreticians, knowingly employs what we call an institutional art definition, a definition where art is no more and no less than what the social-economic network of the art world at any time acknowledges as art. Practicly speaking: What is not exhibited in a gallery, or funded and promoted by the right people, is not art.

So, it is all about the power of definition. And this has been the situation ever since Marcel Duchamp exhibited a pissoir under the title “Fountain” in 1917, hereby preparing the ground for future pop art like Andy Warhole’s ready mades, and morover proving Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel right, as he predicted that the arts would be stripped of their previous transcendental qualities in order to merge with theory. According to Hegel art is closely linked to truth, and the truth demands transparency, not mystery. In short - the mystery of art is gone.

Instead we have the hegemony of artists conceptualizing and intellectualizing their own works of art - if they make the effort to physically make one in the first place - leaving no meta-perspectives unexplained for the audience. 

As I see it, the mystery was lost when the artists started to loose interest in their art medium, in formal problems – and in traditions. And I will not be misinterpreted on this matter – good craftsmanship is of course no guarantee for the creation of art works, and kitsch is a term I myself attach to the sad production of figurative contemporary artists like for instance Vebjørn Sand. But to put it the other way around – an artwork produced with indifference to its physical conditions are likely to be a poor work of art.

You see, I am in fact advocating a modernist understanding of art, despite my contempt for the continued use of “ready-mades”, which I see as a result of a perverted understanding of what modernist art was all about. Theodor Adorno puts it this way: “The artist knows only technical problems, but the society are laid down in these”. He openly warned the artists of consciously aiming to grasp the spirit of their contemporary society. According to Adorno this is more likely to happen when the artist immerses himself into his material.

No wonder I hesitate when entering a conceptual video art exhibition where art works often are reduced to explicit comments on the society, or worse to the exposure of the artist’s private life. I am now speaking very generally of course, there is a lot of nice video art out there, but please allow me to generalize in order to make my point. As the famous video artist William Anastasi puts it: “I am not particularly interested in video per ce, I use whatever is at hand in order to express myself” (Michael Rush, Video Art).

So, nowadays, art is all about “expressing oneself”, and the notions of privacy and subjectivity are being confused.

Of course art is all about expressing one self! It always has been. But “expressing one self” used to mean something more than “exposing one self”, communicating ones feelings explicitly and without any philter. This is the way in which art is deprived of transcendental qualities!

I mean - look at this dude! A performance artist from the 1970s, doing what? 

Seriously: we - need - to - get - back - to – the artwork.

Just like "anti-art blogger" Glen Coco, I cannot care less of the explicit thoughts or emotions of the artists, and at some point I stopped visiting art museums and turned to video games.

And I found that the intensity of transcendental aesthetical experiences was once again available to me. I identified an art genre in which the joy of creating was traceable, and where the “artists” were willing, even eager, to explore the limitations and possibilities of their medium. What happens when a narrative becomes systemic? When it puts its public in center? These were the questions game producers and developers asked themselves, and to explore these problems, they had to establish a tradition.

Just like in film – you have different genres and different schools, and they are all needed in order to allow the real art works to enfold – to widen, challenge, mix or reject the established traditions. There is a subtle difference between a Steven Spielberg production and a David Lynch production. As I see it, the first is good craftsmanship the latter is art. Lynch would however not be able to do what he does if he did not know the traditions of film, just like a musician will have to master his instrument before he can experiment or improvise with it.

Contemporary artists has created a tradition of anti-tradition and anti-commercialism and dwells on a self confirming arena where everybody believes to be innovative and doing ground breaking stuff, while they are really just “preaching to the congregation" as we say in Norway, that is, to an already dedicated Host of positioned or wannabe-positioned representatives of the art world.

As a folklorist, I claim that tradition is the true keeper of the mystery of art, and the alternate confirmation and rejection of it the true driving force of artistic development. 

To quote Mikkel B Tin, a remarkable folklorist who just published a book on the aesthetics of traditions:

“Tradition is not constituted by a series of mechanical repetitions of the past, as if successive experiences could not teach us anything. Tradition allows us to employ old experiences in developing new intentions”.

Or as I like to put it: No innovation without tradition!

I hold computer and video games as true bearers of tradition as they are dependent on a continued development of the technology they are based on and represent established techniques and schools. But it is of utter importance that we do not reduce the question of computer game aesthetics to the degree of realism in the graphics, or to any other isolated sensible aspect of the games. This is what Kellee Santiago does, one of the producers of Flower – a boring video game where you are supposed to blow pentacles over a vast field, end of story (!).

Glaring colors, sentimental music and non-ludic activities are not getting computer games any closer to art, quite contrarily: they engage a long since departed understanding of aesthetics – linked primarily to the pleasure of the senses. Santiago thus writes herself out of any interesting art debate, and serves the opposite purpose than she thinks she does. Art theoreticians loose any interest they might have had, and rightfully so.

We need to look at what is the specific aesthetic quality of video games, what they do that other art mediums cannot. Grant Tavinor is a New Zealandic philosopher who has found it necessary to define video games before presenting their aesthetical qualities. And like several other game theoreticians (Eric Zimmerman and Aaron Smuts for instance), he points to their ludic, or rather systemic character when doing this. Thus we need to look at the gameplay, the game engine: the system that enables a totality of elements to create a good gaming experience in order to identify and evaluate the aesthetical qualities of a computer games. The real conceptual art is what game producers refer to as “concept art”. The concept is here serving a bigger and more formally anchored vision than presenting an awkward or provoking idea in a randomly arranged gallery installation.

Anyway: Games are essentially systemic, and aesthetically oriented technology definitely invites us to study new formal problems in the arts. A tentative conception of computer games as art will, as I see it, contribute to discussions on art and aesthetics on a fundamental level.

I have not given you any examples of video games I consider as art in this paper (except a few graphic hints in my power point), but I hope we can find some examples in a continued discussion on the matter, if you are interested. I know that I have not been kind to the contemporary arts, and I admit that I have put things to a head in order to make my points, and maybe to provoke you a bit. But I am very open to any counter arguments or critical questions, be that in Norwegian or English.