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| 11.19.2006Color me a modernist dinosaur.
I read with interest Nathan Piazza's observations on the fragile relationship between the industry and the academy. I agree with him that industry often has unrealistic assumptions about what the academy can or will do for us. We certainly can't expect knee-jerk support; some game-related research will undoubtedly produce results that we don't like.
But what really caught my attention was this line:
One of the funniest [manifestations of developer anxiety about how people perceive us] is the attempt to get people to call or consider games "art". It's funny because in the academy only modernist dinosaurs care about what's "art" and what isn't anymore. But some developers think if they can get that term to stick, games will all of a sudden become "legitimate", whatever that might mean.
I would reply that one of the reasons the academy earns the contempt of so many of our political leaders and gets its funding cut is that far too many of its members have embraced the postmodernist nonsense that everything is, or can be art -- an extension of the pernicious notion that all things are relative and all points of view on a subject are equally valid. If all things are art, there's no more point in funding art museums, is there? Just how funny is that?
(What I would consider funny is watching a postmodernist turn down a life-saving drug on the grounds that a pharmaceutical researcher's perspective is no better than anybody else's.)
My sympathies are firmly with the modernist dinosaurs who see art as something special that, when it does its job well, touches us and moves us. I'm pretty far from being a populist -- witness my recent call for the development of more highbrow games -- but in this case I believe the majority of the general public are of the same opinion, and they're right. THAT is why it's so important to gain the legitimacy that the status of art will give us. When people see our works as art, they won't vote for politicians who consider it safe to attack our works because they're trivial and irrelevant. (And if you really don't know what "legitimacy" means, there's a definition for you: you're culturally legitimate when you're no longer an easy target for a politician seeking the votes of the ignorant.)
This issue isn't about some kind of egotistical search for recognition. It's about survival. Put simply, I don't want to see what happened to comic books happen to us. And if the academy is too wrapped up in its own self-defeating perspective to help us, I guess us dinosaurs will have to keep roaring out the message on our own. Maybe we can persuade the public directly. It will be a sad day for education, though, when Joe Sixpack is better able to recognize great art than the highly-trained professors whom the public expect to know it.-Ernest Adams
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Letters to the Editor
